Siberia’s boreal forests represent an economically and ecologically precious resource, a significant part of which is not monitored on a regular basis. Synthetic aperture radars (SARs), with their sensitivity to forest biomass, offer mapping capabilities that could provide valuable up-to-date information, for example about fire damage or logging activity. The European Commission SIBERIA project...

The European eel Anguilla anguilla L. is found in most European waters. This widespread species is usually exploited by small-scale companies fishing in localized areas. This implies a contrast of scales. This study analysed data on recruitment, stock, and fisheries to determine how they vary geographically. Coherence between 17 data series on glass eel recruitment is analysed by multivariate t...

Bottom-up segmentation methods merge similar neighboring regions according to a decision rule and a merging order. In this paper, we propose a contribution for each of these two points. Firstly, under statistical hypothesis of similarity, we provide an improved decision rule for region merging based on significance tests and the recent statistical inequality of McDiarmid. Secondly, we propose a...

In 2008 (Pinto da Costa, Alonso, & Cardoso, 2008) we proposed the unimodal paradigm for ordinal data classification and also a new coefficient to measure the performance of ordinal data classifiers; that is, classifiers for the important and often neglected case where there is an order relation between the classes. Many real life settings exist which involve classifying examples (instances) int...

Repeated measurements of plots are usually made to directly determine carbon stock changes over time. However, it is sometimes only practical or feasible to inventory plots at the end of a period of interest, and stock changes need to be predicted retrospectively from supplementary information on growth rate. This situation applied to the natural stratum of post-1989 forest in New Zealand, for ...

Changes in forest carbon stocks are a determinant of the regional carbon budget. In the past several decades, China has experienced a pronounced increase in forest area and density. However, few comprehensive analyses have been conducted. In this study, we employed the Forest Identity concept to evaluate the changing status of China's forests over the past three decades, using national forest i...

In this paper techniques are described for the automated detection of solar Active Regions (ARs). AR detection is achieved using intensity thresholds and a region growing procedure. These procedures have been tested on full-disk solar images from the Meudon observatory for the months of April and July 2002 and compared with their manually generated synoptic maps. Comparisons were also made with...

In this paper, we present a task-specific segmentation method that incorporates semantic knowledge into datadriven segmentation process through different region merge scores. Starting from a simple region growing algorithm which results in over-segmented regions, we apply region merging method designed specifically for each task such as road extraction or vegetation area identification. Further...