Many of us winter sport enthusiasts will still remember the last Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver 2010: fantastic organisation and weather—a real ‘folk festival’ with street parties up in Whistler and in downtown Vancouver. However, we also remember a high number of injuries and tears of disappointment among athletes in the spectacular snowboard and ski freestyle races at Cypress Mountain spec...

This work presents an approach on high-level semantic feature detection in video sequences. Keyframes are selected to represent the visual content of the shots. Then, low-level feature extraction is performed on the keyframes and a feature vector including color and texture features is formed. A region thesaurus that contains all the high-level features is constructed using a subtractive cluste...

The geographic distribution of Astragalus (Fabaceae) in Iran was analyzed using a database of 7606 georeferencedobservations. Astragalus occurs in all provinces of Iran, but 88% ofthe observations are in five provinces including Tehran, West-Azerbaijan, Esfahan, Kordestan, and Khorasan-e Razavi.Most species are rare and narrowly endemic: Thelargest distance between two observations of the same ...

Accurate long-term snow-covered-area mapping is essential for climate change studies and water resource management. The NOAA AVHRR/2 provides a unique data source long-term, large-spatial-scale monitoring of snow-covered areas at daily scale. However, the value in limited, due to its lack shortwave infrared band snow/cloud discrimination. We simulated reflectance 3.75 µm mid-infrared with radia...

Mountains are essential sources of freshwater for our world, but their role in global water resources could well be significantly altered by climate change. How well do we understand these potential changes today, and what are implications for water resources management, climate change adaptation, and evolving water policy? To answer above questions, we have examined 11 case study regions with ...