Carlos Henrique Grohmann

University of São Paulo | USP · Institute of Energy and Environment

We present the DEMIX `wine contest', a novel framework for a practical approach to inter-compare a range of candidate digital elevation models (DEMs) based on pre-defined criteria and a statistically sound ranking approach, known as the randomized complete block design (RCBD). Ranking a collection of wines or a set of DEMs from a given set of candi...

Remotely Piloted Aircrafts (RPAs) are commonly used as a platform for collecting images which can be processed with Structure from Motion-Multi View Stereo (SfM-MVS) to generate 3D models. However, mobile applications for mapping planning are not designed for image acquisition of vertical surfaces, such as quarry walls or large cliffs, leaving the...

Gravitational mass movements are natural destructive processes that can cause enormous losses. New technologies such as laser scanning and remotely piloted aircrafts (RPA) along with photogrammetry technique Structure-from-Motion-Multi-View Stereo (SfM-MVS) photogrammetry technique provides an alternative to conventional mapping methods. A hill wit...

Spatial arrangement of distinct Amazonian environments through time and its effect on specialized biota remain poorly known, fueling long-lasting debates about drivers of biotic diversification. We address the late Quaternary sediment deposition that assembled the world's largest seasonally flooded ecosystems. Genome sequencing was used to reconstr...

Landslides are destructive and recurrent natural disasters on steep slopes and represent a risk to lives and properties. Knowledge of relict landslides' location is vital to understand their mechanisms, update inventory maps and improve risk assessment. However, relict landslide mapping is complex in tropical regions covered with rainforest vegetat...

Automatic landslide mapping is crucial for a fast response in a disaster scenario and for improving landslide susceptibility models. Recent studies highlighted the potential of deep learning methods for automatic landslide segmentation. However, only a few works discuss the generalization capacity of these models to segment landslides in areas that...

Event-based landslide inventories are essential sources to broaden our understanding of the causal relationship between triggering events and the occurring landslides. Moreover, detailed inventories are crucial for the succeeding phases of landslide risk studies like susceptibility and hazard assessment. The openly available inventories differ in t...

Aeronaves Remotamente Pilotadas (RPA, ou drones) possuem alto potencial para monitorar atividades de Restauração Florestal, tendo apresentado boa acurácia ao medir parâmetros estruturais da vegetação, mas ainda carecendo de maiores estudos quanto à medição automática do parâmetro biodiversidade. Em florestas em início de regeneração na Amazônia, a...

Monitoring the vegetation structure and species composition of forest restoration (FR) in the Brazilian Amazon is critical to ensuring its long-term benefits. Since remotely piloted aircrafts (RPAs) associated with deep learning (DL) are becoming powerful tools for vegetation monitoring, this study aims to use DL to automatically map individual cro...

Landslides have caused tremendous damage to human lives and property safety. However, the complex environment of mountain landslides and the vegetation coverage around landslides make it difficult to identify landslides quickly and efficiently using high-resolution images. To address this challenge, this article presents a feature-based constraint...

Abstract Landslide identification is important for understanding their conditioning factors, and for constructing susceptibility, risk, and vulnerability maps. In remote sensing this can be accomplished manually or through classifiers. This study compares three image classifiers (Maximum Likelihood, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machines (SVM))...

Landslide susceptibility studies are a common type of landslide assessment. Landslides are one of the most frequent hazards in Brazil, resulting in significant economic and social losses (e.g., deaths, injuries, and property destruction). This paper presents a literature review of susceptibility mapping studies in Brazil and analyzes the methods an...

Digital elevation models (DEMs) provide fundamental depictions of the three-dimensional shape of the Earth’s surface and are useful to a wide range of disciplines. Ideally, DEMs record the interface between the atmosphere and the lithosphere using a discrete two-dimensional grid, with complexities introduced by the intervening hydrosphere, cryosphe...

Statistical susceptibility assessment is a common approach applied worldwide for shallow landslide studies. Identification of morphological and geological conditions is essential and still incipient to evaluate the susceptibility of landslide events in the Brazilian territory. This study aimed to develop and compare shallow landslide susceptibility...

This paper presents an initiative recently launched under the auspices of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) aiming at providing harmonised terminology and methods, as well as practical guidelines and results allowing the intercomparison of continental or global Digital Elevation Models (DEM). As the work is still ongoing the main...

Traditional forest restoration (FR) monitoring methods employ spreadsheets and photos taken at the ground level. Since remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) generate a panoramic high resolution and georeferenced view of the entire area of interest, this technology has high potential to improve the traditional FR monitoring methods. This study evaluates h...

Forests worldwide are facing increasingly frequent climate extremes due to global warming. The negative effects of climate change on tropical forests have been extensively reported by both permanent plots and tree-ring studies that targeted forest's responses to climate. While they focus mostly on community and population levels, the effects of lan...

Aim There is little consensus on which environmental variables are best at predicting multiple dimensions of diversity. We ask whether there are common environmental correlates of diversity, despite ecological differences, across nine clades of plants and animals distributed along a single rainforest domain. For that, we compare the environmental c...

Shallow landslides are one of the most frequent mass movements in Brazil. Methods to study this kind of process and for construction of shallow landslide inventories are heterogeneous, since there are no standardized mapping guidelines in Brazil. The aim of this paper is to review the methodologies mostly used for shallow landslide inventories cons...

This study aims to assess the land use and land cover change through the use of three pixel-based methods of image classification (Mahalanobis, Maximum Likelihood, and Minimum Distance) in the region of Volta Grande do Xingu (Brazilian Amazon), under influence of the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant. Different pixel-based classification methods...

The scope of this work is to carry out a morphometric analysis of Pluto’s impact craters. A global Pluto digital elevation model (DEM) with a resolution of 300 m/px, created from stereoscopic pairs obtained by the New Horizons Mission, was used to extract the morphometric data of craters. Pluto’s surface was divided according to different morphomet...

Plastic found in the coastal zone is a result of waste mismanagement. This material comes directly from offshore disposal or by fishing debris, other marine activities, and by marine currents and winds, as well as urban drainage systems and estuaries. Specifically, in the case of plastic pellets, which are spheres with 2-5 mm that constitute the ra...

Plastic found in the coastal zone is a result of waste mismanagement. This material comes directly from offshore disposal or by fishing debris, other marine activities, and by marine currents and winds, as well as urban drainage systems and estuaries. Specifically, in the case of plastic pellets, which are spheres with 2-5 mm that constitute the ra...

Sand dunes are commonly regarded as a challenge to traditional photogrammetry due their homogeneous texture and spectral response. In this work we present an evaluation of Structure from Motion–Multi View Stereo (SfM-MVS) to obtain high-resolution elevation data of coastal sand dunes based on images acquired by Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA). A Di...

Landslide inventory maps are crucial to validate predictive landslide models; however, since most mapping methods rely on visual interpretation or expert knowledge, detailed inventory maps are still lacking. This study used a fully convolutional deep learning model named U-net to automatically segment landslides in the city of Nova Friburgo, locate...

Throughout the world, Restoration of Degraded Areas (RDA) is not only a global but also a local challenge. In this context, the Brazilian government committed itself to restore 12 million hectares of forests by 2030. RDA monitoring customarily depends on extensive fieldwork to collect data on all individuals planted. As Remotely Piloted Aircrafts (...

We present a new 52 m composite record (COL17c) composed of five sedimentary sequences retrieved from the Colônia basin (Southeastern Brazil). The COL17c record is composed of two main sub-units deposited under different regimes: a peatland above ∼14 m and lacustrine sediments below. Sedimentary description and core scanning (MSCL and XRF) are firs...

We identify key interdisciplinary questions and approaches to understanding the paleogeographic and biotic history of Amazonia. We discuss the importance of comparing evolutionary taxonomic units across groups and considering their particular environmental affinities as a framework for a mechanistic understanding of how the diversity of Amazonia wa...

Recent concerns about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions have a clear effect on the energy sector, directly affecting the use of fossil fuels. Companies and countries that depend on these sources of energy (so-called not clean) take actions to search for palliative solutions. The production of atlases of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is...

The origin of modern disjunct plant distributions in the Brazilian Highlands with strong floristic affinities to distant montane rainforests of isolated mountaintops in the northeast and northern Amazonia and the Guyana Shield remains unknown. We tested the hypothesis that these unexplained biogeographical patterns reflect former ecosystem rearrang...

The origin of modern disjunct plant distributions in the Brazilian Highlands with strong floristic affinities to distant montane rainforests of isolated mountaintops in the northeast and northern Amazonia and the Guyana Shield remains unknown. We tested the hypothesis that these unexplained biogeographical patterns reflect former ecosystem rearrang...

In this work, we present an analysis of dune migration and volume change of the Garopaba dune field, southern Brazil, based on Airborne LiDAR (ALS - 2010) and Structure from Motion-Multi View Stereo (SfM-MVS - 2019). The accuracy of the SfM-MVS reconstruction was validated by a comparison between Terrestrial LiDAR (TLS) and SfM-MVS DEMs. Elevation...

In this work a 3D digital model generated with SfM-MVS is used to investigate rock slope stability. The test site is a deactivated quarry used as recreational area for climbers. The model was divided in three sectors. Sector 1 has the least steep slope and structures are parallel to slope face. Sectors 2 and 3 have steeper slope angles and are pron...

This work proposes the application of two 3D digital models of rock surfaces generated through the SfM-MVS workflow to obtain surface parameters such as the surface roughness coefficient. Two case studies are presented: Model 1 ia a fault surface on a limestone and Model 2 is a fracture surface on a granite block. A Barton comb profilometer was use...

Gravitational mass movements like landslides are natural destructive processes that can cause enormous losses. Although crucial, identification and monitoring of such areas is time consuming and costly. New technologies such as laser scanning, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and Structure-from-Motion-Multi-View Stereo (SfM-MVS) photogrammetry provid...

UAV flight control applications designed for mapping, inspection and 3D model generation do not provide tools for autonomous flight and image acquisition of vertical surfaces, such as quarry walls or large cliffs, leaving the user to a manual flight operation. In this work we describe a workflow to program autonomous UAV missions designed to acquir...

This work presents a 1:10,000 geomorphological mapping of an area in southeastern Brazil, based on morphometric analysis of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), while classical methods focus on photo interpretation. Data derived from the DEM include elevation, slope gradient, slope aspect, vertical and horizontal curvatures, amplitude, elongation and w...

In the Amazonian lowlands, the shift from a large wetland dominated by flooded forests (Varzea) to the modern incised valleys bounded by extensive areas of non-flooded forests (Terra Firme) is considered a key driver of the Amazonian mega-biodiversity. Dating the sedimentary beds covered by Terra Firme forest is crucial to constrain the timing of s...

This work presents the development of a three-dimensional (3D) model of an outcrop of the Corumbataí Formation (Permian, Paraná Basin, Brazil) using Structure from Motion - Multi-View Stereo (SfM-MVS) technique in order to provide a structural analysis of clastic dikes cutting through siltstone layers. While traditional photogrammetry requires the...

This work presents a 1:10,000 geomorphological mapping of an area in southeastern Brazil, basedon morphometric analysis of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), while classical methods focus onphoto interpretation. Data derived from the DEM include elevation, slope gradient, slope aspect,vertical and horizontal curvatures, amplitude, elongation and wave...

This work presents the development of a three-dimensional model of an outcrop of the Corumbataí Formation using Structure from Motion and Multi-View Stereo (SfM-MVS) techniques in order to provide a structural analysis of clastic dikes cutting through siltstone layers. Composed mainly of fine sand and silt, these dikes are formed by sand intrusions...

This work presents the development of a three-dimensional model of an outcrop of the Corumbataí Formation using Structure from Motion and Multi-View Stereo (SfM-MVS) techniques in order to provide a structural analysis of clastic dikes cutting through siltstone layers. Composed mainly of fine sand and silt, these dikes are formed by sand intrusions...

The Amazon region hosts the world's largest watershed spanning from high elevation Andean terrains to lowland cratonic shield areas in tropical South America. This study explores variations in optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) signals in suspended silt and riverbed sands retrieved from major Amazon...

This paper investigates differences between morphometric parameters (slope and aspect) derived from a resampled DEM and resampled morphometric data derived from a medium resolution DEM, with examples for three study areas in South America selected to represent flatlands, hilly terrain, and mountain ranges. Using a low resolution DEM for regional sc...

Editorial to the IJGIS Special Issue on "Geological applications of digital terrain analysis". In this volume, the modern advances in the field of geological terrain analysis are presented, while emphasis is given to the quantitative analysis of modern datasets.

A missão Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) foi realizada para mapear o relevo da área continental da Terra com interferometria de radar entre 60º de latitude norte e 54º de latitude sul. A utilização de Modelos Digitais de Elevação (MDEs) em geomorfologia permite o cálculo de variáveis associadas ao relevo com rapidez e precisão. Neste artigo...

The Cariris Velhos Metagranitoids are considered an important geological unit of the Transversal Zone (Borborema Province – NE Brazil). We evaluated the use of raw and processed digital images to obtain the deformation ellipsoid for the Cariris Velhos Metagranitoids using the Inertia Tensor and Intercepts methods. The ellipsoid symmetry of the defo...

An evaluation of SRTM 03” data applicability in geomorphology and morphotectonics analysis is proposed, considering the morphometric parameters slope, aspect, surface roughness and isobase surface. The study area, in southeastern Brazil, comprises the Poços de Caldas Alkaline Massif, a 33km-diameter Late Cretaceous collapsed volcanic caldera. Morph...

Development and interpretation of morphometric maps are important tools in studies related to neotectonics and geomorphology; Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allows speed and precision to this process, but applied methodology will vary according to available tools and degree of knowledge of each researcher about involved software.A methodology...

Trend-surface analysis was carried out on data from morphometric parameters isobase and hydraulic gradient. The study area, located in the eastern border of Quadrilátero Ferrífero, southeastern Brazil, presents four main geomorphological units, one characterized by fluvial dissection, two of mountainous relief, with a scarp of hundreds of meters of...

A first assessment of the TanDEM-X DEMs over Brazilian territory is presented through a comparison with SRTM, ASTER GDEM and ALOS AW3D30 DEMs in seven study areas with distinct geomorphological contexts, vegetation coverage and land use. Visual analysis and elevation histograms point to a finer effective spatial resolution of TanDEM-X compared to S...

The quality of digital elevation models (DEMS) determines the quality of geomorphometric analysis. Remote sensing can help with the acquisition of better DEMs, especially through high spatial resolution sensors and sensors with three-dimensional imaging capabilities. Imaging by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is still being explored as a remote sen...

Since January 1st, 2017, the Board of Directors of the Brazilian Geological Society has honored the signatories to assume the editorial activities of the Brazilian Journal of Geology (BJG). Our responsibility is tremendous in the face of the hard work and efforts made by the previous Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Umberto G. Cordani, who was in charge of t...

Global Digital Elevation Models (GDEMs) are datasets of vital importance for regional-scale analysis in areas such as geomorphology, [paleo]climatology, oceanography and biodiversity. In this work I present a comparative assessment of the datasets ETOPO1 (1’ resolution), GTOPO30, GLOBE, SRTM30 PLUS, GMTED2010 and ACE2 (30”) against the altitude of...

Global Digital Elevation Models (GDEMs) are datasets of vital importance for regional-scale analysis in areas such as geomorphology, [paleo]climatology, oceanography and biodiversity. In this work I present a comparative assessment of the datasets ETOPO1 (1’ resolution), GTOPO30, GLOBE, SRTM30 PLUS, GMTED2010 and ACE2 (30”) against the altitude of...

The acquisition of geological attitudes on rock cuts using traditional field compass survey can be a time consuming, dangerous, or even impossible task depending on the conditions and location of outcrops. The importance of this type of data in rock-mass classifications and structural geology has led to the development of new techniques, in which t...

The objective of this research is to develop maps of vulnerability for the city of Guarulhos, to identify vulnerable areas to spillage and help sanitations companies to define priority areas for leakage control and also the occurrence of geological accidents induced by these. The maps were produced using the methodology of map algebra developed in...

The Xingu River is a large clearwater river in eastern Amazonia and its downstream sector, known as the Volta Grande do Xingu ("Xingu Great Bend"), is a unique fluvial landscape that plays an important role in the biodiversity, biogeochemistry and prehistoric and historic peopling of Amazonia. The sedimentary dynamics of the Xingu River in the Volt...

Relatórios são recursos didáticos empregados para que os alunos apresentem, na forma de texto acadêmico, um tema relacionado à disciplina em curso. São, portanto, parte do processo natural de aprendizagem dos estudantes. Muitas vezes, no entanto, o aluno enfrenta maior dificuldade na elaboração do relatório em si do que na aprendizagem sobre o tópi...

This paper investigates differences between morphometric parameters (slope and aspect) derived from a resampled DEM and resampled morphometric data derived from a medium resolution DEM, with examples for three study areas in South America selected to represent flatlands, hilly terrain, and mountain ranges. Using a low resolution DEM for regional sc...