The Life in the Atacama (LITA) project seeks to develop technologies for robotic life detection and apply them to the investigation of the Atacama Desert. Its field investigation in 2005 will demonstrate highly autonomous robotic science and daily multi-kilometer traverses over several weeks. A key component is mission-level path planning, which combines large-scale route selection, path and ac...

JOHN A. STANTURF1, BRIAN J. PALIK2, MARY I. WILLIAMS3, R. KASTEN DUMROESE4, and PALLE MADSEN5 1Center for Forest Disturbance Science, Southern Research Station, U.S. Forest Service, Athens, Georgia, USA 2Center for Research on Ecosystem Change, Northern Research Station, U.S. Forest Service, Grand Rapids, Minnesota, USA 3School of Forest Resources and Environmental Sciences, Michigan Technologi...

Beni Lew, Lolita Trachtengertz, Shany Ratsin, Gideon Oron and Amos Bick* 1 Department of Civil Engineering, Ariel University, Ariel, Israel 2 Agriculture Research Organization Volcani Center, Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Bet Dagan, Israel 3 The Department of Chemical Engineering, Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Ramat-Gan, Israel 4 Department of Environment Water Resources, ...

risk assessment provides the possibility of planning and management to prevent and reduce the risk of desertification. the present study is aimed to assess the hazard and risk of desertification and to develop management programs in the semi-arid western regions of golestan province in iran. desertification rate was obtained using the iranian model of desertification potential assessment. since...

We introduce the notion of nested distance desert automata as a joint generalization and further development of distance automata and desert automata. We show that limitedness of nested distance desert automata is PSPACE-complete. As an application, we show that it is decidable in 22 O(n2) space whether the language accepted by an n-state non-deterministic automaton is of a star height less tha...

An important bottleneck in model-based design of embedded systems is the cost of constructing models. This cost can be significantly decreased by increasing the reuse of existing model components in the design process. This paper describes a tool suite, which has been developed for component-based model synthesis. The DESERT tool suite can be interfaced to existing modeling and analysis environ...

Drought and heat stresses are major challenges for turfgrass management in the desert southwest of United States where rainfall is insufficient to support managed growth. Irrigation water availability its quality increasingly strained due diminishing surface supplies. Unprecedented drought conditions threaten reliance on groundwater supplies that heavily scrutinized irrigation practices landsca...

Desert vegetation plays significant roles in securing the ecological integrity of oasis ecosystems in western China. Timely monitoring of photosynthetic/non-photosynthetic desert vegetation cover is necessary to guide management practices on land desertification and research into the mechanisms driving vegetation recession. In this study, nonlinear spectral mixture effects for photosynthetic/no...