Barrier islands are dynamic ecosystems that change gradually from coastal processes, including currents and tides, and rapidly from episodic events, such as storms. These islands provide many important ecosystem services, including storm protection and erosion control to the mainland, habitat for fish and wildlife, and tourism. Habitat maps, developed by scientists, provide a critical tool for monitoring changes to these dynamic ecosystems. Barrier island monitoring often requires custom habitat maps due to several factors, including island size and the classification of unique geomorphology-based habitats, such as beach, dune, and barrier flats. In this study, we reviewed barrier-island-specific habitat mapping efforts and highlighted common habitat class types, source data, and mapping approaches. We also developed a framework for mapping geomorphology-based barrier island habitats using a rule-based, geographic object-based image analysis approach, which included the use of field data, tide data, high-resolution orthophotography, and lidar data. This framework integrates several barrier island mapping advancements with regard to the use of landscape position information for automated dune extraction and the use of Monte Carlo analyses for the treatment of elevation uncertainty for elevation-dependent habitats. Specifically, we used the uncertainty analyses to refine automated dune delineation based on elevation relative to extreme storm water levels and to increase the accuracy of intertidal and supratidal/upland habitat delineation. We found that dune extraction results were enhanced when elevation relative to storm water levels and visual interpretation were also applied. This framework could also be applied to beach–dune systems found along a mainland.
We consider the problem of state observation for systems having a well-defined observability canonical form ([9]) by means of high-gain observers. The main goal is to show that, for this class of systems, observers can be designed with the highgain parameter powered just up to the order 2 regardless the dimension of the state system. In this way we substantially overtake the main limitations of standard design procedures in which the high-gain parameter is powered up to the order of the system. The observer structure, which generalises the ideas presented in [2], can be used in all those contexts where fast state observation is required, such as in the design of output feedback stabilisers by means of the nonlinear separation principle that is also specifically addressed in the paper.
As the number of Cloud services is growing at a tremendous speed, there is an increasing number of service providers offering similar functionalities. Selecting services with user desired non-functional properties (NFPs) becomes of significant importance but triggers a number of Big Data related research issues. First, the selection decision should deal with a large volume of service NFPs data. Second, service selection needs to reflect diverse user preferences, including both qualitative and quantitative ones. Third, the uncertainty of the network and service load leads to high variability in NFPs. Fourth, as the trust values of service NFPs are collected via historic user's feedbacks, it brings the veracity dimension to the NFPs of services. Fifth, multiple and sometimes conflicting decision objectives for optimal service selection should be balanced. An effective service selection mechanism is in demand that can tackle all the above Big Data challenges in an integrated way to handle the highly diverse QoS with significant variability along with the trust related issues giving rise to data veracity. Existing investigations focus on either users' QoS preferences or their trust concerns but fail to provide a systematic solution to integrate both criteria in the selection process. In this paper, we tackle heterogeneous preferenceand trust-based service selection by developing a novel multi-objective optimization approach to make trade-off decision between service's trust value and user's QoS preference to rank candidate Cloud services based on their match degrees with users' requirements. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.
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