Arnon Karnieli

• Prof.
• Head of Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Biological soil crusts, commonly referred to as biocrusts (including lichens), play a vital ecological role in arid environments by stabilizing the soil, reducing erosion, and influencing nutrient and water cycles. Remote sensing has become an indispensable tool for mapping biocrusts because it can efficiently analyze extensive and inaccessible are...

Timely access to soil moisture distribution is critical for agricultural production. As an in-orbit L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR), SAOCOM offers high penetration and full polarization, making it suitable for agricultural soil moisture estimation. In this study, based on the single-temporal coupled water cloud model (WCM) and Oh model, we fi...

Vegetation Index (VI) curves, derived from multi-temporal satellite images, are being widely employed to model the crop-specific phenological events. The current study analyzed a novel approach to mitigate the effect of violating the Independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) assumption in classifying the VI curves. Even though deep learning-b...

Ecological datasets are inherently complex, heterogeneous, and often span different time series. The links between spatial and temporal data and ecological/environmental science are framed in the discipline of ecoinformatics. The rapid growth of ecoinformatics has led to a demand for software collections specifically designed for environmental data...

Satellite-based onboard data processing is crucial for time-sensitive applications requiring timely and efficient rapid response. Advances in edge artificial intelligence are shifting computational power from ground-based centers to on-orbit platforms, transforming the "sensing-communication-decision-feedback" cycle and reducing latency from acquis...

Recent climatic changes have profoundly impacted the urban microclimate, exposing city dwellers to harsh living conditions. One effective approach to mitigating these events involves incorporating more green infrastructure into the cityscape. The ecological services provided by urban vegetation play a crucial role in enhancing the sustainability an...

Gross primary productivity (GPP) is an Essential Variable needed for evaluating the status and changes in terrestrial ecosystems. Measuring GPP in the Alpine and Arctic tundra is especially important. It is also challenging, due to the remoteness of the sites and the harsh weather conditions. Nevertheless, an effort is necessary to understand the b...

Discovering ancient agricultural terraces in desert regions is important for the monitoring of long-term climate changes on the Earth's surface. However, traditional ground surveys are both costly and limited in scale. With the increasing accessibility of aerial and satellite data, machine learning techniques bear large potential for the automatic...

Fairy circles (FCs) are a unique phenomenon characterized by circular patches, 4–10 m in diameter, of bare soil within a vegetated matrix. This project aimed to study the spatial and spectral characteristics of FCs on a landscape scale in Namibia. The specific objectives of this research are (1) processing satellite observations to explore the FCs...

Despite the harsh climatic conditions in the Central Negev Desert, Israel, thousands of dry stonewalls were built across ephemeral streams between the fourth and seventh centuries CE to sustain productive agricultural activity. Since 640 CE, many of these ancient terraces have remained untouched but buried by sediments, covered by natural vegetatio...

This poster has been presented at the 2023 ASSW conference in Vienna, Austria, and describes the ongoing activities aimed at extracting GGP indexes of the tundra vegetation in Svalbard (NO) using the micro satellite VENmS and in situ- measurements of GPP for validation. Satellite data are particularly valuable in the High Arctic, where acquiring...

Discovering ancient agricultural terraces in desert regions is important for the monitoring of long-term climate changes on the Earth's surface. However, traditional ground surveys are both costly and limited in scale. With the increasing accessibility of aerial and satellite data, machine learning techniques bear large potential for the automatic...

In most parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, solar radiation cannot penetrate clouds. Therefore, cloud detection and masking are essential in image preprocessing for observing the Earth and analyzing its properties. Because clouds vary in size, shape, and structure, an accurate algorithm is required for removing them from the area of interest. Th...

Monitoring transportation for planning, management, and security purposes has become a growing interest for various stakeholders. A methodology for detecting moving vehicles is based on the acquisition time gap between the pushbroom detector sub-arrays. However, this technique requires overcoming differences in ground sampling distance and/or spect...

Earth observation data processing requires interpretable deep learning (DL) models that learn physically significant and meaningful features. The current study proposes approaches to make the network to learn meaningful features. In addition, a set of interpretability- and explanation-based evaluation strategies are proposed to evaluate the DL mode...

Remote sensing estimation of evapotranspiration (ET) directly quantifies plant water consumption and provides essential information for irrigation scheduling, which is a pressing need for California vineyards as extreme droughts become more frequent. Many ET models take satellite-derived Leaf Area Index (LAI) as a major input, but how uncertainties...

Remote sensing (RS) enables a cost-effective, extensive, continuous and standardized monitoring of traits and trait variations of geomorphology and its processes, from the local to the continental scale. To implement and better understand RS techniques and the spectral indicators derived from them in the monitoring of geomorphology, this paper pres...

Water salinity is a widespread agricultural hazard that affects approximately 20% of irrigated land, causing a significant yield reduction in crops. Stress coping mechanisms by plants were thoroughly examined but understanding of plant adaptation and acclimation is still lacking and is often species- and variety-specific. Presently, the biochemical...

Global population growth has resulted in land-use (LU) changes in many natural ecosystems, causing deterioration in the environmental conditions that affect soil quality. The effect of LU on soil quality is acute in water-limited systems that are characterized by insufficient availability of soil organic resources. Thus, the main objective of this...

This paper synthesizes the contemporary challenges for the sustainability of the social-environmental system (SES) across a geographically, environmentally, and geopolitically diverse region – the Asian Drylands Belt (ADB). This region includes 18 political entities, covering 10.3% of global land area and 30% of total global drylands. At the presen...

The state-of-the-art crop phenological classifiers use vegetation index (VI) time-series data and deep learning (DL) techniques. However, the scarcity of training samples limits the performance of these approaches. Unlike the conventional augmentation techniques, the data augmentation of VI curves should preserve the crop-specific phenological even...

The relatively coarse spatial resolution of hyperspectral images causes the mixing of disparate materials’ spectral responses in the sensor's instantaneous field of view (IFOV), resulting in mixed pixels. The current study proposes a capsule-based generative encoding model, called a denoising unmixing encoder network (DUENet), to formulate an end-t...

The bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) is crucial in determining the quantity of reflected light on the earth’s surface as a function of solar and view angles (i.e., azimuth and zenith angles). The Vegetation and ENvironment monitoring Micro-Satellite (VENµS) provides a unique opportunity to acquire data from the same site, with...

Aim To advance our understanding of the mechanisms that mediate the relationships between global climatic and anthropogenic processes and pathogen occurrence, it is crucial to evaluate the exact pathways connecting the ecological mediators and the pathogen responses across spatial and temporal heterogeneities at various scales. We investigated the...

Satellite images provide valuable long-term and spatially extended datasets in the Arctic, where acquiring vast and remote data is particularly challenging. These precious data allow assessing the tundra soil-vegetation dynamics and capacity to act as a carbon sink, as well as the spatiotemporal changes in vegetation biomass. Specifically, vegetati...

Management zones (MZs) are efficient for applying site-specific management in agricultural fields. This study proposes an approach for generating MZs using time-series clustering (TSC) to also enable time-specific management. TSC was applied to daily remote sensing retrievals in a California vineyard during four growing seasons (2015–2018) using th...

Accurate monitoring of grassland aboveground fresh biomass (called AGB in the study) and its spatial-temporal dynamics is indispensable for sustainable grassland management. The most common method used in estimating AGB with remotely sensed data is based on the relationship between field AGB measurements and vegetation indices (VIs); however, the e...

The high spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions of the Vegetation and Environment monitoring New Micro-Satellite (VENµS) satellite data facilitate field-level phenological analysis of crops. This study proposes deep learning (DL) based approaches to resolve the issues prevalent in crop phenology-based fingerprint estimation at field-level usin...

Climate and land-use change profoundly affect plant species distribution (SD) and composition, and the impact of these processes is expected to increase in the coming years. As a proxy of global changes, knowledge of SD and diversity along climatic gradients is essential to determine the efforts needed for species conservation. Plant spectral diver...

The motivation for improving gridded precipitation data lies in weather now-casting and flood forecasting. Therefore, over the past decade, Commercial Microwave Link (CML) attenuation data have been used to determine rain rates between microwave antennas, and to produce more accurate countrywide precipitation grids. CML networks offer a unique adva...

Crude oil pollution is a global environmental concern since it persists in the environment longer than most conventional carbon sources. In December 2014, the hyper-arid Evrona Nature Reserve, Israel, experienced large-scale contamination when crude oil spilled. The overarching goal of the study was to investigate the possible changes, caused by an...

Classification of crops using time-series vegetation index (VI) curves requires appropriate modeling of phenological events and their characteristics. The current study explores the use of capsules, a group of neurons having an activation vector, to learn the characteristic features of the phenological curves. In addition, joint optimization of den...

Mining contributes significantly to economic development, but it also entails extensive environmental damage, such as soil degradation and water and air pollution. Mining activity impacts the soil quality, often making it unable to support ecosystem function and structure. The current study aims to apply the soil quality index (SQI) as a methodolog...

Spatiotemporal data can be analyzed by applying spatial, time-series, and machine learning algorithms to extract regional biocrust trends. Analyzing the spatial trends of biocrusts through time, using satellite imagery, may improve the quantification and understanding of their change drivers. The current work strives to develop a unique framework f...

Controlled environment conditions inside protected agriculture (PA) structures can lead to the development of sustainable agriculture. In developed countries, the rapid growth of technology of sustainable, environmentally friendly agriculture via greenhouses or net-houses is due to the significant changes in climate and increasing demand for qualit...

Assessing the development of wildfire scars during a period of consecutive active fires and smoke overcast is a challenge. The study was conducted during nine months when Israel experienced massive pyro-terrorism attacks of more than 1100 fires from the Gaza Strip. The current project strives at developing and using an advanced Earth observation ap...

A well-planned irrigation management strategy is crucial for successful wine grape production and is highly dependent on accurate assessments of water stress. Precision irrigation practices may benefit from the quantification of within-field spatial variability and temporal patterns of evapotranspiration (ET). A spatiotemporal modeling framework is...

Crop emergence date is a critical input to models of crop development and biomass accumulation. The ability to robustly detect and map emergence date using remote sensing would greatly benefit operational yield estimation and crop monitoring efforts; however, this has proven to be challenging. Previous remote-sensing phenology algorithms showed tha...

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the social-ecological systems (SES) in the Asian Drylands Belt (ADB), a vast geographical region composed of 17 independent countries and six administrative provinces of China. The ADB, which covers 15.4 million km² and is the home to more than 645 million people, has served as a major human migratory rout...

The capability of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) spectral imagery to assess maize yield under full and deficit irrigation is demonstrated by a Tetracam MiniMCA12 11 bands camera. The MiniMCA12 was used to image an experimental field of 19 maize hybrids. Yield prediction models were explored for different maize development stages, with the best model...

Available renewable energy resources play a vital role in fulfilling the energy demands of the increasing global population. To create a sustainable urban environment with the use of renewable energy in human habitats, a precise estimation of solar energy on building roofs is essential. The primary goal of this paper is to develop a procedure for m...

Water and energy are recognized as the most influential climatic vegetation growth-limiting factors. These factors are usually measured from ground meteorological stations. However, since both vary in space, time, and scale, they can be assessed by satellite-derived biophysical indicators. Energy, represented by land surface temperature (LST), is a...

In the face of rapid global change it is imperative to preserve geodiversity for the overall conservation of biodiversity. Geodiversity is important for understanding complex biogeochemical and physical processes and is directly and indirectly linked to biodiversity on all scales of ecosystem organization. Despite the great importance of geodiversi...

Vegetation state is usually assessed by calculating vegetation indices (VIs) derived from remote sensing systems where the near infrared (NIR) band is used to enhance the vegetation signal. However VIs are pixel-based and require both visible and NIR bands. Yet, most archived photographs were obtained with cameras that record only the three visible...

A spatially distributed land surface temperature is important for many studies. The recent launch of the Sentinel satellite programs paves the way for an abundance of opportunities for both large area and long-term investigations. However, the spatial resolution of Sentinel-3 thermal images is not suitable for monitoring small fragmented fields. Th...

Weather radar can provide spatially explicit precipitation grids. However interference, ground clutter and various causes of attenuation introduce uncertainty into the result. Typically, rain gauge observations, recognized as a precise measure of precipitation at point locations, are used to adjust weather radar grids to obtain more accurate precip...

The role played by unsustainable resource management in initiating international conflicts is well documented. The Syrian Civil War, commencing in March 2011, presents such a case. The prevailing opinion links the unrest with sequential droughts occurring from 2007–2010. Our research, however, reveals that the winter-rainfed agricultural conditions...

Adjustment of weather radar estimates using observed precipitation has been an accepted procedure for decades. Ground observations of precipitation typically come from rain gauges, but can also include data from diverse networks of sensors, with different levels of reliability. This study presents a standardized framework for evaluating adjustment...

Abstract: Invasive plant species (IPS) are the second biggest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss. Since the spatial extent of IPS is essential for managing the invaded ecosystem, the current study aims at identifying and mapping the aggressive IPS of Acacia salicina and Acacia saligna, to understand better the key factors influencing their d...

Knowledge of baseline water use for irrigated crops in the U.S. Southwest is important for understanding how much water is consumed under normal farm management and to help manage scarce resources. Remote sensing of evapotranspiration (ET) is an effective way to gain that knowledge: multispectral data can provide synoptic and time-repetitive estima...

Spatial resolution enhancement is a pre-requisite for integrating unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) datasets with the data from other sources. However, the mobility of UAV platforms, along with radiometric and atmospheric distortions, makes the task difficult. In this paper, various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures are explored for reso...

A remote sensing-based evapotranspiration (ET) study was conducted over the Central Arizona Irrigation and Drainage District (CAIDD), an Arizona agricultural region. ET was assessed means for 137 wheat plots, 183 cotton plots, and 225 alfalfa plots. The remote sensing ET models were the Satellite-Based Energy Balance for Mapping Evapotranspiration...

Land-use changes as a result of residential development often lead to degradation and alter vegetation cover (VC). Although these are worldwide phenomena, sufficient knowledge about anthropogenic effects caused by various populated areas in dryland ecosystems is lacking. This study explored anthropogenic development in rural areas and its effects o...

Spatiotemporal ecological modelling of terrestrial ecosystems relies on climatological and biophysical Earth observations. Due to their increasing availability, global coverage, frequent acquisition and high spatial resolution, satellite remote sensing (SRS) products are frequently integrated to in situ data in the development of ecosystem models (...

Satellite-based particulate matter (PM) models provide spatially and temporally resolved estimations, allowing greater spatial-temporal coverage compared to sparse ground monitoring stations. The spatio-temporal resolution of these models can be improved using aerosol optical depth (AOD) products from various satellite platforms with different over...

Organic matter content in the soil is one of the most significant indicators of evaluating the soil fertility, and dynamic monitor of it is good for further development of accurate agriculture. In recent years, obtaining Vis-NIR continuous spectrum data of soil through hyperspectral technique and realizing accurate inversion prediction according to...

The hyper-arid Evrona nature reserve in the southern Arava Valley, one of the most unique and threatened ecosystems in Israel, experienced a large scale oil contamination in December 2014, when approximately 5,000 cubic meters of crude oil were spilled and spread into the reserves main and side streams. Given the expected adverse impact of the poll...

Obtaining soil moisture quickly and timely can grasp the needs of water of the crops, which is very important for the agricultural production. Soil spectral reflectance provides an alternative method to classical physical and chemical analysis of soil in laboratory for the estimation of a large range of key soil properties. Therefore, the soil mois...

The albedo of bare soil depends on its organic matter, iron oxide, carbonate contents, and reflectance geometry, features considered stable over time, and also depends on salinity, moisture and roughness, which change dynamically due to agricultural practices. This paper deals with the quantitative estimation of the amount of shortwave radiation th...

Sunflower broomrape (Orobanche cumana) is a root holoparasitic plant causing major damage to sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.). Parasite infection initiates source-sink relations between the parasite (sink) and the host (source), allocating carbohydrates, water and nutrients to the parasite. The primary aim of the current study was to explore respon...

Soil available phosphorus (AP) is supposed to be an important nutrient constituent for the growth and development of crops. Hyperspectral analysis has proven to be a rapid and effective means for quantitatively predicting soil AP, which has a good prospect benefit from the narrow bandwidth and the high resolution. However, the existence of multicol...

Soil nutrients, including available nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), and potassium (K), are critical properties for monitoring soil fertility and function. Spectroscopy analysis has proven to be a rapid and effective means for predicting soil properties, in general, and NPK, in particular. However, different calibration methods, including preprocessi...

Soil available nitrogen is supposed to be an important nutrient constituent for the growth and development of crops. In-situ field visible-near infrared (VIS-NIR, 350~2 500 nm) spectroscopic analysis is a rapid and non-destructive method that has the potential to predict nitrogen. Further, it is cost-effective method compared with traditional labor...

Remote sensing offers a potential tool for large scale environmental surveying and monitoring. However, remote observations of coral reefs are difficult especially due to the spatial and spectral complexity of the target compared to sensor specifications as well as the environmental implications of the water medium above. The development of sensors...

Field spectroscopy has been suggested to be an efficient method for predicting soil properties using quantitative mathematical models in a rapid and non-destructive manner. Traditional multivariate regression algorithms usually regard the modeling of each soil property as a single task, which means only one response variable is considered as the ou...

Urbanization dynamics are commonly subjected to powerful market forces, only partly managed by land-use plans. The density, location and pattern of urbanized areas affect rainfall-runoff relations. Consequently, it is essential to understand future impacts of urbanization on runoff and produce focused regulation. The goal was to analyze land-cover...

The quantification of spatial rainfall is critical for distributed hydrological modeling. Rainfall spatial patterns generated by similar weather conditions can be extremely diverse. This variability can have a significant impact on hydrological processes. Stochastic simulation allows generating multiple realizations of spatial rainfall or filling m...

Chemical composition, microphysical, and optical properties of atmospheric aerosol deep inland in the Negev Desert of Israel are found to be influenced by daily occurrences of sea breeze flow from the Mediterranean Sea. Abrupt increases in aerosol volume concentration and shifts of size distributions towards larger sizes, which are associated with...

Runoff-harvesting systems (RHSs) design to collect runoff water and nutrients from small rocky watersheds into ponds bounded by soil dikes (termed limans) that are used as an afforestation grove. Our study aimed at quantifying the influence of RHSs using two indicators: soil quality (SQ) and aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) in a small wa...

Hyperspectral sensing can detect slight changes in plant physiology, and may offer a faster and nondestructive alternative for water status monitoring. This premise was tested in the current study using a narrow‐band ‘water balance index’ ( WABI ), which is based on independent changes in leaf water content (1500 nm) and the efficiency of the nonph...

To use VRI systems, a field is divided into irrigation management zones (IMZs). While IMZs are dynamic in nature, most of IMZs prescription maps are static. High-resolution thermal images (TI) coupled with measured atmospheric conditions have been utilized to map the within-field water status variability and to delineate in-season IMZs. Unfortunate...

Broomrape (Orobanche and Phelipanche spp.) parasitism is a severe problem in many crops worldwide, including in the Mediterranean basin. Most of the damage occurs during the sub-soil developmental stage of the parasite, by the time the parasite emerges from the ground, damage to the crop has already been done. One feasible method for sensing early,...

The objective of this study was to assess the relationship between the hyperspectral reflectance of soils and their albedo, measured under various roughness conditions. 108 soil surface measurements were conducted in Poland and Israel. Each surface was characterised by its diurnal albedo variation in the field as well as by its reflectance spectra...

Weed infestations in agricultural systems constitute a serious challenge to agricultural sustainability and food security worldwide. Amaranthus palmeri S. Watson (Palmer amaranth) is one of the most noxious weeds causing significant yield reductions in various crops. The ability to estimate seed viability and herbicide susceptibility is a key facto...

Land-use changes are one of the most important factors causing environmental transformations and species diversity alterations. The aim of the current study was to develop a geoinformatics-based framework to quantify alpha and beta diversity indices in two sites in Israel with different land-uses, i.e., an agricultural system of fruit orchards, an...