Arnold Bregt

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing

The delta region between Rotterdam and Antwerp is a prime example of an area where spatial develoments face increasing complexity. This complexity demands a new approach to spatial planning and design. This book is a result of a research project aimed to develop such a new planning practice. The research conceived of the Southwest Delta of the Neth...

Land cover identification and area quantification are key aspects of implementing the European Common Agriculture Policy. Legitimacy of support provided to farmers is monitored using the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS), with land cover identification performed by visual image interpretation. While the geometric orthoimage quality required...

Land-use change models are typically calibrated to reproduce known historic changes. Calibration results can then be assessed by comparing two datasets: the simulated land-use map and the actual land-use map at the same time. A common method for this is the Kappa statistic, which expresses the agreement between two categorical datasets corrected fo...

Frequent drought and worsening salinity intrusion challenge future land uses and livelihoods in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. The central government is, therefore, formulating a new strategy premised on adaption to natural environmental dynamics. For an achievable strategy that bridges the gap between plans and practice, it is important to understan...

There is an implementation gap between government plans and land-use changes at the local level in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. This stands in the way of the sustainable development of the delta, especially in the face of environmental degradation, climate change, and water-use conflicts. To narrow the gap between plans and practice, the government...

The development of a European Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) officially started with the entry into force of the INSPIRE Directive in 2007. INSPIRE’s implementation phase should be completed by the European Union (EU) and its member states at the end of 2021: a pivotal point to evaluate INSPIRE’s current governance and explore future scenarios....

In order to facilitate and coordinate spatial data sharing and exchange, many organisations have developed spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). SDI governance plays a pivotal role in the development and evolution of an SDI, but as SDIs are complex adaptive systems, governing is a challenge. This research therefore proposes a complexity perspective...

The importance and influence of spatial data has risen in all kinds of governmental and non-governmental processes, giving spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) a key role in spatial data sharing and dissemination. SDIs are nowadays challenged by new technologies and user demands. Proper SDI governance seems essential, but it is unclear to what exten...

Large-scale land change maps are essential to support policies addressing land transformations. Calibration and validation of large-scale land change maps require reference data that are commonly acquired by visual interpretation of remotely sensed images. However, visual interpretation itself is prone to error. Little is known about factors influe...

Reference data for large-scale land cover map are commonly acquired by visual interpretation of remotely sensed data. To assure consistency, multiple images are used, interpreters are trained, sites are interpreted by several individuals, or the procedure includes a review. But little is known about important factors influencing the quality of visu...

This contribution tests the added value of including landslide path dependency in statistically based landslide susceptibility modelling. A conventional pixel-based landslide susceptibility model was compared with a model that includes landslide path dependency and with a purely path-dependent landslide susceptibility model. To quantify path depend...

Arnold Bregt Met vereende krachten worden de verspreide tafels in de kantine van de Leeuwenborch in twee lange rijen gezet. Alles wordt in gereedheid gebracht voor het diner van de ruim 100 afgevaardigden van het 'Eco-Schools'-netwerk. Ze zijn in het kader van een studieweek te gast in Wageningen. Het concept 'Eco-Schools' was voor mij nieuw, maar...

Purpose: Mekong Delta's shrimp farming contributes to socio-economic development but tends to reduce the mangrove area. On the one hand, NGOs advocate balancing ecology and economy, while on the other hand, the Vietnamese government supports intensifying shrimp production. The latter strategy increases shrimp diseases and marginalises smallholders....

Soil salinity increase is a serious and global threat to agricultural production. The only database that currently provides soil salinity data with global coverage is the Harmonized World Soil Database, but it has several limitations when it comes to soil salinity assessment. Therefore, a new assessment is required. We hypothesized that combining s...

This contribution tests the added value of including landslide path dependency in statistically-based landslide susceptibility modelling. A conventional pixel-based landslide susceptibility model was compared with a model that includes landslide path dependency, and with a purely path dependent landslide susceptibility model. To quantify path depen...

p>Dynamics of coupled Social-Ecological Systems (SES) result from the interplay of society and ecology. To assess SES resilience, we constructed an Agent-Based Model (ABM) of a land use system as a stereotypical example of SES and investigated how resilience of the represented system is affected by both external disturbances and internal dynamics....

Land cover identification and area quantification are key aspects in determining support payments to farmers under the European Common Agricultural Policy. Agricultural land is monitored using the Land Parcel Identification System and visual image interpretation. However, shadows covering reference parcel boundaries can hinder effective delineation...

The Climate‐Smart Landscape (CSL) approach has recently emerged as an integrated management strategy to address the increasing pressures on agricultural production, ecosystem conservation, rural livelihoods, and climate change mitigation/adaptation. Agribusiness companies play a controversial role in achieving CSL goals. On one hand, their operatio...

Increased soil salinity is a significant agricultural problem that decreases yields for common agricultural crops. Its dynamics require cost and labour effective measurement techniques and widely acknowledged methods are not present yet. We investigated the potential of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) remote sensing to measure salt stress in quinoa p...

Maize production is of critical importance to smallholder farmers in Ghana. Various factors limit the productivity of smallholder maize farming systems undergirded by the lack of capital for critical investments both at the farm and at national policy levels. Using a value chain approach, this diagnostic study explains how a complex configuration o...

Note: a pdf of the final and accepted version of this paper is available for download until 1 November 2018 at this link https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1XizX_4XYggJAo from ScienceDirect This study explores the implications of engaging students, versus professionals/experts, in pilot-testing of SDSS, and discusses likely differences in terms of exp...

Landslide susceptibility modelling — a crucial step towards the assessment of landslide hazard and risk — has hitherto not included the local, transient effects of previous landslides on susceptibility. In this contribution, we implement such transient effects, which we term "landslide path dependency', for the first time. Two landslide path depend...

In the coastal area of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, much of the mangrove forest has been cut to make space for expansion of industry and aquaculture. Export‐oriented shrimp farming is a particularly fast‐growing business. Nonetheless, the importance of tropical mangrove forest ecosystems for coastal protection and marine biodiversity is widely reco...

Environmental sensing data provide crucial information for environment-related decision-making. Formal data are provided by official environmental institutes. Beyond those, however, there is a growing body of so-called informal sensing data, which are contributed by citizens using low-cost sensors. How good are these informal data.and how might the...

Policies supporting rice production and investments in water infrastructure enabled intensification and diversification of farming systems in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) over the past 20 years. Yet, demands of food security, economic development, and climate change continue to pose diverging and often conflicting challenges for water resource...

The research presented here examined at which spatial and temporal resolution urban metabolism should be analysed to generate results that are useful for implementation of urban planning and design interventions aiming at optimization of resource flows. Moreover, it was researched whether a lack of data currently hampers analysing resource flows at...

Spatial decision support systems (SDSS) represent a step forward in efforts to account for the spatial dimension in environmental decision-making. The aim of SDSS is to help policymakers and practitioners access, interpret and understand information from data, analyses and models, and guide them in identifying possible actions during a decision-mak...

Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) are becoming more mature worldwide. However, despite this growing maturity, longitudinal research on the governance of SDIs is rare. The current research examines the governance history of two SDIs in the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium). Both represent decades-long undertakings to create a large-scale base map...

Web page with abstracts of full papers (3000-6000 words), URL for the Springer-book containing the full texts. Also including links to the full texts of short papers (2000-3000 words), poster abstracts (500-1000 words) and posters.

Landslide susceptibility map (LSM) is a key element in hazard mitigation, risk management and regional planning. In mountainous area, hazard prediction, disaster prevention, mitigation strategies, crisis and risk management , and proper land use planning need reliable and accurate landslide susceptibility mapping. We got inspired when we looked at...

Landslides cause major environmental damage, economic losses and casualties. Although susceptibility to landsliding is usually considered an exclusively location-specific phenomenon, indications exist that landslide history co-determines susceptibility to future landslides. In this contribution, we quantified the role of landslide path dependency (...

Spatial decision support systems (SDSS) represent a step forward in efforts to account for the spatial dimension in environmental decision-making. The aim of SDSS is to help policymakers and practitioners access, interpret and understand information from data, analyses and models, and guide them in identifying possible actions during a decision-mak...

Data availability is a persistent constraint in social policy analysis. Web 2.0 technologies could provide valuable new data sources, but first, their potentials and limitations need to be investigated. This paper reports on a method using Twitter data for deriving indications of active citizenship, taken as an example of social indicators. Active...

Door het openstellen van overheidsdata heeft Nederland de afgelopen jaren flinke stappen gezet om de potentiële voordelen van open data te verwezenlijken. Deze voordelen behelzen een transparantere, efficiëntere, effectievere overheid en het stimuleren van innovaties en economische groei. Een voorbeeld van een dergelijke stap is het open stellen va...

A change of canopy temperature can indicate stress in vegetation. Use of canopy temperature to assess salt stress in specific plant species has been well studied in laboratory and greenhouse experiments, but its potential for use in landscape-level studies using remote sensing techniques has not yet been explored. Our study investigated the applica...

Heugelijk nieuws in maart 2014: het AHN is open data! Sindsdien is de hoogtedata voor iedereen gratis en vrij toegankelijk. Binnen korte tijd is hier met plezier gebruik van gemaakt. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek naar de effecten van het open AHN door de Wageningen University & Research. Vooral de zakelijke sector investeert en innoveert omtrent deze ve...

Land suitability classification is important in planning and managing sustainable land use. Most approaches to land suitability analysis combine a large number of land and soil parameters, and are time-consuming and costly. In this study, a potentially useful technique (combined feature selection and fuzzy-AHP method) to increase the efficiency of...

Land systems are characterised by many feedbacks that can result in complex system behaviour. We defined feedbacks as the two-way influences between the land use system and a related system (e.g., climate, soils and markets), both of which are encompassed by the land system. Land models that include feedbacks thus probably more accurately mimic how...

Addressing the global challenges of climate change (CC), food security and poverty alleviation requires enhancing the adaptive capacity and mitigation potential of land use systems. To this end, Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) aims to identify land use practices that sustainably increase productivity, enhance climate change (CC) adaptation and cont...

Landslides are a major category of natural disasters, causing loss of lives, livelihoods and property. The critical roles played by triggering (such as extreme rainfall and earthquakes), and intrinsic factors (such as slope steepness, soil properties and lithology) have previously successfully been recognized and quantified using a variety of quali...

Land-change models are increasingly used to explore land-change dynamics, as well as for policy analyses and scenario studies. In this paper we review calibration and validation approaches adopted for recently published applications of land-change models. We found that statistical analyses and automated procedures are the two most common calibratio...

Finding land use strategies that merge land-based climate change mitigation measures and adaptation strategies is still an open issue in climate discourse. This article explores synergies and trade-offs between REDD+, a scheme that focuses mainly on mitigation through forest conservation, with “Climate Smart Agriculture”, an approach that emphasize...

In recent years, there has been an increasing trend of releasing public sector information as open data. Governments worldwide see the potential benefits of opening up their data. The potential benefits are more transparency, increased governmental efficiency and effectiveness, and external benefits, including societal and economic benefits. The pr...

Landslide susceptibility maps are typically obtained by quantifying relations between landslides and conditioning attributes. Here, we take a fundamentally different starting point: path dependency and self-organization, i.e. the effect of landslides on landslides. We test two hypotheses: first, that landslides do preferentially follow landslides,...

Citizen science is increasingly being used in diverse research domains. With the emergence and rapid development of sensor technologies, citizens potentially have more powerful tools to collect data and generate information to understand their living environment. Although sensor technologies are developing fast, citizen sensing has not been widely...

Ik nodig u uit om mee te doen aan een klein experiment. Ga eens rustig met het blad Geo-Info achterover zitten en geef voor uzelf antwoord op de volgende vragen. A: wat is de meest gevaarlijke plaats waar u ooit bent geweest? B: wat is de mooiste plek waar uw bent geweest? En C: wat is de saaiste plek waar u bent geweest? Bent u er al uit?

Data availability is a persistent constraint in social policy analysis. Web 2.0 technologies could provide valuable new data sources, but first, their potentials and limitations need to be investigated. This paper reports on a method using Twitter data for deriving indications of active citizenship, taken as an example of social indicators. Active...

Data availability is a persistent constraint in social policy analysis. Web 2.0 technologies could provide valuable new data sources, but first, their potentials and limitations need to be investigated. This paper reports on a method using Twitter data for deriving indications of active citizenship, taken as an example of social indicators. Active...

Spatial information is being increasingly used worldwide within environmental impact assessment (EIA), although the extent of its use has not been exhaustively investigated. Using Kenya as a case study, EIA study reports submitted to the Environment Authority from 2002 to 2013 were investigated for the presence/absence of spatial presentations, lev...

The QUICKScan software tool can be located within the recently emerging discourse where attention is given to the communicative interaction during spatial decision support system (SDSS) development and application. In this regard it was of a research interest to explore the ways in which the QUICKScan software tool allows for knowledge integration...

By 2050, 75 % of the world's population will live in cities and the occurrence of heat wave events might have doubled. Mapping the climate and land use change impact for urban heat events should set the agenda for adaptation planning at the local scale. Literature on urban heat mapping does not reveal a clear indicator to visualise the urban heat i...

Open data zijn in, zowel in Nederland als in veel andere landen in de wereld. Na jaren van terughoudend beleid stimuleren veel overheden het breed en tegen geen of zeer beperkte voorwaarden beschikbaar stellen van data. De verwachting is dat dit de economie stimuleert en de innovatie bevordert. Maar is dat zo? Er is wereldwijd nog weinig empirisch...

Verslag van uitgevoerd onderzoek in het kader van het kennisbasis programma "duurzame ontwikkeling van de groenblauwe ruimte" periode 2011-2014