No abstract

Landslides during earthquakes have led to severe casualties and have resulted in damaged structures and facilities. The goal of the present study is to analyze the landslide problems in a remote area-Shei-Pa National Park in Taiwan. Spatial information techniques (Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System) with an innovative data mining technique, Discrete Rough Set (DRS) method, are incorporated to our study for analyzing landslides, their distribution, and classification. The present study provides how to find (1) the most representative data of landslide samples from the existing database, (2) the core attributes of the target categories: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Vegetation Index (VI), and (3) the thresholds (segment points) of each attribute on the target categories. A conventional approach, C4.5 Decision Tree Analysis, is used as a comparison. The methodology discussed in this study is of help to the analysis of landslide problems and thus facilitates the informed decision-making process.

No abstract

Forest fires constitute a major environmental problem in tropical countries, especially in the context of climate change and increasing human populations. This paper aims to identify the causes of frequent forest fires in Son La Province, a fire-prone and forested mountainous region in northwest Vietnam, with a view to constructing a forest fire-related database with multiple layers of natural, social and economic information, extracted largely on the basis of Landsat 7 images. The assessment followed an expert systems approach, applying multi-criteria analysis (MCA) with an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to determine the weights of the individual parameters related to forest fires. A multi-indicator function with nine parameters was constructed to establish a forest fire risk map at a scale of 1:100,000 for use at the provincial level. The results were verified through regression analysis, yielding R2 = 0.86. A real-time early warning system for forest fire areas has been developed for practical use by the relevant government authorities to provide more effective forest fire prevention planning for Son La Province.

No abstract

Debris flow is often performed through identifying and analyzing the soil condition, hydraulic, geomorphological factors and vegetation conditions. In the present study, a spatial information analysis system is combined with a linear statistical method (principle components analysis with linear discriminant analysis, PCA ? LDA) and an advanced data mining technique (discrete rough sets, DRS) to investigate the debris flow occurrence based on geomorphological and vegetation conditions factors. The analyzed data sources include (1) digital elevation model: to investigate the variation in the landscape, and (2) remote sensing data: to analyze the vegetation and plant conditions on the ground surface. The objective of this research is to define a method with the ability to forecast the level of debris flow susceptibility through the parallel study of statistical outcomes (PCA ? LDA) and data mining results (DRS). The outcomes from PCA ? LDA are inadequate due to the thresholds of the influenced variables not being examined. In this study, the DRS approach not only showed satisfactory results for the thresholds of influenced variables in the study area, but also the occurrence rules of debris flow are generated. Finally, the results show superior classification accuracy (70.8% for debris flow occurrence) for the DRS method over those of PCA ? LDA analysis (54.2% for debris flow occurrence) for the analysis of debris flow occurrence. Therefore, this is an encouraging preliminary approach in the hazard assessment of debris flow.

No abstract

The analysis, measurement, and computation of remote sensing images often require an enhanced supervised classification technique to develop an efficient spatial decision support system. Rice is a crop of global importance, which has drawn a great interest in using remote sensing techniques for evaluating its production. Ancillary information is widely used to improve the classification accuracy of satellite images. However, few of these studies questioned the importance and strategies of using this ancillary information. The enhanced decision support system in our study has two stages. In the first stage, the images are obtained from the remote sensing technique and the ancillary information is employed to increase the accuracy of classification. In the second stage, it is decided to construct an efficiently supervised classifier, which is used to evaluate the ancillary information. Back-propagation neural network (BPN) with extended delta bar delta (EDBD) algorithm is incorporated into our decision support classifier system. This classifier renders two crucial contributions: (1) the EDBD algorithm accelerates the convergence speed of the learning process and (2) the relative importance (RI) on each band of ancillary information is evaluated rationally.