Alexander Kmoch

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Researcher at University of Tartu

Accurate mapping of ditches is essential for effective hydrological modeling and land management. Traditional methods, such as manual digitization or threshold-based extraction, utilize LiDAR-derived digital terrain model (DTM) data but are labor-intensive and impractical to apply for large-scale applications. Deep learning offers a promising alter...

The distylous plant Primula veris has long served as a model species for studying heterostyly, that is the occurrence of multiple floral morphs within a population to ensure outcrossing. Habitat loss, reduced plant population sizes, and climate change have raised concerns about the impact of these factors on morph ratios and the related consequence...

This study introduces a time-lag-informed Random Forest (RF) framework for streamflow time-series prediction across diverse catchments and compares its results against SWAT predictions. We found strong evidence of RF’s better performance by adding historical flows and time-lags for meteorological values over using only actual meteorological values....

Traditional map projections introduce distortions, especially for global data. Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) offer an alternative by dividing the Earth into equal-area grid cells at different resolutions. This paper describes xdggs, a new Xarray extension that simplifies working with DGGS. Xdggs provides a unified API for various DGGS librari...

Large-scale modeling of environmental variables is an increasingly complex but necessary task. In this paper, we review the literature on using machine learning to cope with challenges associated with spatial autocorrelation. Our focus was on studies in which researchers predicted environmental variables using a supervised machine learning regressi...

Landscape elements located on agricultural fields or on their edges play a crucial role in the biodiversity of agricultural land. The landscape elements’ database in Estonia is updated in accordance with the applications of the field owners, and usually it does not represent a real situation of the landscape elements on the field. Hence, the analys...

With the increasing use of social media, we can analyze digital data to gain insights into social and cultural aspects of landscapes and cities. The understanding of the existing cultural ecosystem services (CES) can help improve human life quality through proper planning and execution of plans. This study aims to locate CES produced by Estonian fo...

The digital elevation models (DEMs) are the primary and most important spatial inputs for a wide range of hydrological applications. However, their availability from multiple sources and at various spatial resolutions poses a challenge in watershed modeling as they influence hydrological feature delineation and model simulations. In this study, we...

Study region:: The Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), North Eastern Europe. Study focus:: Time series models are a convenient tool for modeling hydraulic head time series due to their parsimonious parameterization and quick calculation time. However, it is unclear how the model structure and the outcome relate to the respective site cha...

A Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS) is a type of spatial reference system that tessellates the globe into many individual, evenly spaced, and well-aligned cells to encode location and, thus, can serve as a basis for data cube construction. This facilitates integration and aggregation of multi-resolution data from various sources to rapidly calcula...

Soil and land use information are important inputs for physically-based hydrological modeling such as SWAT. Although fine resolution local or regional data are often preferred for modeling, it is not always reliable that these data can lead to better model performance. In this study, we investigate the effect of input data on the sensitivity and un...

In this paper, we discuss new challenges and opportunities in teaching geoinformatics on a conceptual level. We pose that spatial is not special anymore from a technological point of view, but at the same time teaching spatial thinking is more challenging than ever. We summarize our key positions and conclude with a call to action to rethink how we...

Water quality (WQ) modeling can be used for gaining insight into WQ issues in order to implement effective mitigation efforts. Process-based nutrient models are very complex, requiring a lot of input parameters and computationally expensive calibration. Recently, ML approaches have shown to achieve an accuracy comparable to the process-based models...

Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) are spatial reference systems that use a hierarchical tessellation of cells to partition and address the globe and provide alternative spatial data format and indexing methods as compared to traditional vector and raster spatial data. In order to effectively use DGGS, functional software needs to be available and...

Study region The Porijõgi catchment in Estonia, Northern Europe. Study focus The lack of adequate precipitation gauges has long been a major obstacle for hydrological modeling. To date, the global availability of satellite and reanalysis precipitation (SRP) products at an increasingly high spatiotemporal resolution has made their use in hydrologic...

Nutrient runoff from agricultural production is one of the main causes of water quality deterioration in river systems and coastal waters. Water quality modeling can be used for gaining insight into water quality issues in order to implement effective mitigation efforts. Process-based nutrient models are very complex, requiring a lot of input param...

Large-scale hydrological studies are often limited by the lack of available observation data with a good spatiotemporal coverage. This has affected the reproducibility of previous studies and the potential improvement of existing hydrological models. In addition to the observation data themselves, insufficient or poor-quality metadata have also dis...

Executive Summary - A new ‘Beyond SDI’ geospatial ecosystem is needed in response to a geospatial landscape that has evolved radically since spatial data infrastructures (SDI) were first conceptualized in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This evolution includes changes in technology; the volume and nature of geospatial information being generated;...

A major problem related to global water quality analysis and modelling has been the lack of available good quality and consistent water quality measurement datasets with a global spatial coverage. Current study aims to contribute into improving the global datasets on water quality by aggregating and harmonizing five national, continental and global...

To understand, model, and predict landscape evolution, ecosystem services, and hydrological processes, the availability of detailed observation-based soil data is extremely valuable. For the EstSoil-EH dataset, we synthesized more than 20 eco-hydrological variables on soil, topography, and land use for Estonia (10.5281/zenodo.3473289, Kmoch et al.,...

Freely available global digital elevation models (DEMs) are important inputs for many research fields and applications. During the last decade, several global DEMs have been released based on satellite data. ASTER and SRTM are the most widely used DEMs, but the more recently released, AW3D30, TanDEM-X and MERIT, are being increasingly used. Many re...

In an attempt to increase the reproducibility of contributions to a long-running and established geospatial conference series, the 23rd AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science 2020 (https://agile-online.org/conference-2020) for the first time provided guidelines on preparing reproducible papers (Nüst et al., 2020) and appointed a reprodu...

Persistent forest loss in the Brazilian Legal Amazon (BLA) is responsible for carbon emission, reduction of ecosystem services, and loss of biodiversity. Combining spatial data analysis with high spatial resolution data for forest cover and forest loss, we quantified the spatial and temporal patterns of forest dynamics in the BLA. We identified an...

Soil erosion caused by climate and land-use changes is one of the biggest environmental challenges in highland Ethiopia. The aim of this study was to assess the future soil erosion risks and evaluate the potential conservation measures in the Rib watershed, northwestern highland Ethiopia. We used the HadGEM2-ES model with a moderate greenhouse gas...

Abstract. The Soil Map of Estonia is a vector dataset that maps more than 750 000 soil units throughout Estonia at a scale of 1:10 000. It is the most detailed and information-rich dataset for soils in Estonia, a Baltic country with an area of approximately 45 000 km². For each soil unit, it describes the soil type, quality, texture, and...

Polygon tiles in Shapefile and GeoPackage for navigating/selecting EU-SoilHydroGrids 250m GeoTiff tile folders. https://github.com/LandscapeGeoinformatics/EU-SoilHydroGrids_tiles_nav

Geographical Information Science (GIScience), also Geographical Information Science and Systems, is a multi-faceted research discipline and comprises a wide variety of topics. Investigation into data management and interoperability of geographical data and environmental data sets for scientific analysis, visualisation and modelling is an important...

Geographical Information Science (GIScience), also Geographical Information Science and Systems, is a multi-faceted research discipline and comprises a wide variety of topics. Investigation into data management and interoperability of geographical data and environmental data sets for scientific analysis, visualisation and modelling is an important...

The explosive growth of geospatial data has stimulated the development of many standards aimed at decreasing data heterogeneity and enhancing data use. Well-established design methods for geospatial data standards typically involve the creation of two schemas for data structure, designated here as logical and physical, but this can lead to conceptu...

We analyzed the corpus of three geoscientific journals to investigate if there are enough locational references in research articles to apply a geographical search method, such as the example of New Zealand. Based on all available abstracts and all freely available papers of the “New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics”, the “New Zealand Jour...

GWML2 is an international standard for the online exchange of groundwater data that addresses the problem of data heterogeneity. This problem makes groundwater data hard to find and use because the data are diversely structured and fragmented into numerous data silos. Overcoming data heterogeneity requires a common data format; however, until the d...

1) Background: We analyzed the corpus of three geoscientific journals to investigate if there are enough locational references in research articles to apply a geographical search method, on the example of New Zealand. 2) Methods: Based on all available abstracts and all freely available papers of the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, t...

(Online access via the AUT Online Library: http://hdl.handle.net/10292/10740) Groundwater bodies are important and valuable natural resources. To better understand the hydrological state of the environment and groundwater dynamics, data sets and measurements need to be made available and accessible to scientists, planners, and stakeholders to allo...

Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and spatial data web services is becoming common in ecological applications. However, WSNs were developed in application domains with different sensor and user types, and often with their own low-level metadata semantics, data format and communication protocols. The sensor web enablement initiative (SWE)...

The future information needs of stakeholders for hydrogeological and hydro-climate data management and assessment in New Zealand may be met with an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards-compliant publicly accessible web services framework which aims to provide integrated use of groundwater information and environmental observation data in gene...

Extreme weather events are likely to increase in the future, and thus damage to the environment and infrastructure will likely increase during this time, too. To adapt to these weather impacts, forecasting, now-casting, and in situ monitoring installations have increased during the last years. Even though monitoring stations deliver frequent measur...

New Zealand's groundwater resources are inadequately understood to effectively support an integrated and sustainable freshwater management. To appropriately characterise the groundwater aquifers many environmental information are required; among them (hydro-)geological datasets. Usually, proprietary software products are used to establish, visualis...

Zusammenfassung Klimatische Extremereignisse wirken sich stark auf terrestrische und aquatische Land-schaftsökosysteme aus und werden wissenschaftlichen Prognosen zufolge in Zukunft zu-nehmen. In dieser Arbeit stehen die Schneeschmelze und Starkregenereignisse im Vorder-grund, da sie zu 80 % der Gesamt-Jahresfracht des limitierenden Nährstoffs beit...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) integrated with web services are becoming common in widespread applications across the world. WSNs are developed in different application domains of sensor and user types, with each typically relying on its own metadata semantics, data format and software. There is a high demand for standardising access to sensor dat...

New Zealand has 16 regional councils responsible for freshwater management working under a common national legal framework. However, management of water quality, water consents and water quantity measurement is a regional responsibility and so is data collection and storage. In order to provide a seamless spatial view of collected groundwater relat...