Luís Moreira De Sousa

ISRIC - World Soil Information | ISRIC

Present global maps of soil water retention (SWR) are mostly derived from pedotransfer functions (PTFs) applied to maps of other basic soil properties. As an alternative, ‘point-based’ mapping of soil water content can improve global soil data availability and quality. We developed point-based global maps with estimated uncertainty of the volumetri...

SoilGrids produces maps of soil properties for the entire globe at medium spatial resolution (250 m cell size) using state-of-the-art machine learning methods to generate the necessary models. It takes as inputs soil observations from about 240 000 locations worldwide and over 400 global environmental covariates describing vegetation, terrain morph...

SoilGrids produces maps of soil properties for the entire globe at medium spatial resolution (250 metres cell size) using state-of-the-art machine learning methods to generate the necessary models. It takes as inputs soil observations from about 240 000 locations worldwide and over 400 global environmental covariates describing vegetation, terrain...

>>> See online platform at https://soilgrids.org/ <<< Soil information is fundamen8tal for many global applications, such as food security, land degradation, water resources, hydrology, climate change and ecological conservation. To address these diverse needs, it is important to provide free, consistent, easily accessible and standardized soil in...

SoilGrids maps soil properties for the entire globe at medium spatial resolution (250 m cell side) using state-of-the-art machine learning methods. The expanding pool of input data and the increasing computational demands of predictive models required a prediction framework that could deal with large data. This article describes the mechanisms set...

Multi-criteria decision models have been recently implemented in many urban flood risk management schemes due to the increasing demand of low-cost and reliable solutions to prevent and control overflow from sewer systems. Based on specific targets, these decision models encompass multiple reward (or objective) functions according to socio-economic...

PyWPS 4 is a re–make of the Python implementation of the WPS standard. It is the result of the work of over a dozen individual contributors, during a period of almost three years. One of the goals driving this re–implementation was to embrace modern Python technologies and the possibilities they open.This technical note reviews some of the more adv...

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...

Soil classification is a method of encoding the most relevant information about a given soil, namely its composition and characteristics, in a single class, to be used in areas like agriculture and forestry. In this paper, we evaluate how confidently we can predict soil classes, following the World Reference Base classification system, based on the...

This study compares the performance of five popular equal-area projections supported by Free and Open Source Software for Geo-spatial (FOSS4G)—Sinusoidal, Mollweide, Hammer, Eckert IV and Homolosine. A set of 21,872 discrete distortion vindicatrices were positioned on the ellipsoid surface, centred on the cells of a Snyder icosahedral equal-area gr...

In order to be able to address local, regional and global issues such as sustainable land management, food security, climate change mitigation and soil-related indicators of the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development the need for reliable, relevant and accurate soil information and data is increasing. Currently, the soil data community is providing...

The SoilGrids system (www.soilgrids.org) uses machine learning algorithms to predict soil type and basic soil properties at seven depths on global extent. These algorithms (i.e., random forests, gradient boosting) are trained with soil observations assembled from 150 000 locations across the globe as stored in WoSIS (ISRIC’s World Soil Information...

The volume and coverage of spatial data has increased dramatically in recent years, with Earth observation programmes producing dozens of GB of data on a daily basis. The term Big Spatial Data is now applied to data sets that impose real challenges to researchers and practitioners alike. As rule, these data are provided in highly irregular geodesic...

The volume and coverage of spatial data has increased dramatically in recent years, with Earth observation programmes producing dozens of GB of data on a daily basis. The term Big Spatial Data is now applied to data sets that impose real challenges to researchers and practitioners alike. As rule, these data are provided in highly irregular geodesic...

The volume and coverage of spatial data has increased dramatically in recent years, with Earth observation programmes producing dozens of GB of data on a daily basis. The term Big Spatial Data is now applied to data sets that impose real challenges to researchers and practitioners alike. The difficulties are partly related to a lack of tools suppor...

Full-text view-only version: http://rdcu.be/Ig25. The increasing complexity of urban planning projects today requires new approaches to better integrate stakeholders with different professional backgrounds throughout a city. Traditional tools used in urban planning are designed for experts and offer little opportunity for participation and collab...

Newly available, more detailed and accurate elevation data sets, such as Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) generated on the basis of imagery from terrestrial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), can be used to improve flood-model input data and consequently increase the accuracy of the flood modelling result...

This article presents the results of a usability evaluation initiative conducted on the Domain Specific Language for Spatial Simulation Scenarios (short name DSL3S) and its supporting tools. This language applies a Model-Driven Development approach to spatial simulation, providing model development through the composition of graphical elements and...

The activation of available in-sewer storage volume has been suggested as a low-cost flood and combined sewer overflow mitigation measure. However, it is currently unknown what the attributes for suitable objective functions to identify the best location for flow control devices are and the impact of those attributes on the results. In this study,...

Hexagonal segmentations of space have long been known for their advantages vis à vis squared partitions in discretizing spatial variables, be it natural phenomena or human-related features. However, readily available and easy-to-use tools to manipulate and interact with hexagonal rasters remain widely unavailable today. This article presents a firs...

In this study we explore the potential advantages of the hexagonal meshes for cellular automata-based flood modelling applications. We conduct a set of flood simulations and compare the quality of the modelling results in terms of water depth and flow velocity for the square and hexagonal cell geometries. The results showed that water depths obtain...

Preliminary results of Eawag’s work on the CENTAUR project. An extended abstract can be found in the conference proceedings.

Presentation to the CAMUSS 2016 conference held in Québec. Presents early results of the hexagonal grid implementation of the rapid flood model CAFlood using the CADDIES cellular automata framework.

The OGC® Web Processing Service (WPS) Interface Standard provides rules for standardizing inputs and outputs (requests and responses) for geospatial processing services, such as polygon overlay. The standard also defines how a client can request the execution of a process, and how the output from the process is handled. It defines an interface that...

The OGC® Web Processing Service (WPS) Interface Standard provides rules for standardizing inputs and outputs (requests and responses) for geospatial processing services, such as polygon overlay. The standard also defines how a client can request the execution of a process, and how the output from the process is handled. It defines an interface that...

Techniques such as cellular automata and agent-based models have long been used in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to capture and simulate the dynamics of change of spatial information. However, spatial simulation has been largely absent from traditional GIS software pack- ages, unlike most other spatial analysis techniques. The r...

This article describes DSL3S, a domain specific modelling language for Spatial Simulation in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Techniques such as cellular automata and agent-based modelling have long been used to capture and simulate the temporal dynamics of spatial information. Tools commonly employed to implement spatial simulati...

The development and use of Domain Specific Languages emerged as a way to cope with complex problems using concepts closer to the problem domain. By leveraging the principles proposed by Model-Driven Development (MDD), like the separation of concerns and the use of model transformations, this approach became popular and caused the emergence of a var...

Cellular automata and agent-based modelling techniques have long been used for spatial simulation in the Geographic Information Systems field. However, they largely rely on code libraries and pre-compiled models, either requiring advanced programming skills or imposing scope constraints. Several domain specific languages have been proposed in this...

The complexity of urban projects today requires new approaches to integrate stakeholders with different professional backgrounds. Traditional tools used in urban planning are designed for experts and offer little opportunity for participation and collaborative design. This paper introduces the concept of Geospatial Tangible User Interfaces (GTUI),...

Cellular automata and agent-based modelling techniques have long been used for spatial simulation in the Geographic Information Systems field. However, they largely rely on code libraries and pre-compiled models, either requiring advanced programming skills or imposing scope constraints. Several domain specific languages have been proposed in this...

During the past decade governments across Europe have set in place a series of programmes to expand investment on grid-connected solar power technology, most especially Photovoltaics (PV). Recently most of these programmes have been rolled back, in face of rapidly declining costs. Using a simple model this article shows that basic PV electricity co...

Cities are a major focus for the reduction of CO2 emissions. This requires the development of innovative strategies involving all activity sectors and putting these into practice by policies, actions and measures. Questions cities would like to answer are: What are the impacts of concrete policies or innovative projects regarding CO2 emissions? The...

The integrated Geospatial Urban Energy Information & Support System (iGUESS) is currently being developed as part of an EU project to reduce CO2emissions in five European cities. The project is intended to create a decision support platform providing access to distributed data sources and analysis and modelling tools through a single web-based inte...

Spatial simulation has been largely absent from traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software packages. Both the advanced skills needed to use this technique and the relative specificity of its application has resulted in a myriad of independent tools, each with different features. The choice of a proper tool for disclosing the dynamics...

Seafloor morphology is one of the main subjects of oceanographic research. However, currently there are some obstacles to the dissemination of this information. Web based GIS could play an important role in minimizing such problem, breaking some barriers between the potential users community and the data. Web-GIS can effectively maximize the hydrog...

RESUMO Desde o seu nascimento os SIG electrónicos têm seguido o modelo da Cartografia tradicional apresentando informação espacial projectada num plano. Dado que os computadores pessoais têm hoje capacidades suficientes para representar informação em três dimensões com a mesma facilidade com que representam em duas, será útil perspectivar a represe...

The theoretical advantages of hexagonal grids over rectangular grids have been known for a large number of years. Among these, two can be stressed out: the higher spatial resolution achieved with the same number of samples and the isotropy of local neighbourhoods. This work explores such advantages in the representation of flow directions used in h...

Os dados altimétricos obtidos por interferometria radar pela missão SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission) encontram-se disponíveis para a totalidade da Península Ibérica sob a forma de um modelo digital de elevação (MDE), com uma precisão horizontal de 3 segundos de arco (~ 90 m) e precisão vertical de 1 metro.

Traditional land cover mapping imposes a prede fined taxonomy with mutually-exclusive hard categories upon a surface which can be percei ved as continuous. Boundary uncertainty and heterogeneity of resulting regi ons are inherent to such appr oach, but can nevertheless be reduced through the definition and application of explicit criteria. Foll owi...

O Sistema de Gestão de Pavimentos da Estradas de Portugal, EPE (SGPav), é composto essencialmente por três módulos: Base de Dados Rodoviária; Avaliação da Qualidade dos Pavimentos; Avaliação das Estratégias de Aplicação dos Recursos. Neste artigo descreve-se o método utilizado para levantamento do estado de conservação da rede viária da administraç...