Muhammad Imran

• Master of Science in Physics; Master of Science in Information Technology; Master of Science in Geo-informatics; and Degree of doctor from University of Twente, The Netherlands
• Professor (Assistant) at Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University

Evidence-based policy-making generally applies scientifically rigorous methods to arrive at location-based decisions for public service facilities. The provision of equal opportunities is becoming increasingly difficult due to urbanization. Most studies examined the inequality in context with social indicators and few empirical studies focused on t...

The field of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) has emerged with the spirit of providing 'Data as a Service' to overcome the technical and conceptual barriers to sharing spatial data. An SDI is developed essentially as an open service platform, in which a loosely coupled system connects users and applications with data sources with a high level of s...

The study objective is to predict the epidemiological impact of dengue fever arbovirosis in urban tropical areas of Pakistan. To do so, we used the GPS-based data of the Aedes larvae collected during 2014-2015 in Lahore. We developed a Geographically Weighted Logistic Regression (GWLR) model for Geospatially predicting larvae presence or absence in...

The cultivated land under gram (Cicer arietinum) crop fields and bare land of Khushab are transforming into Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) forest land cover because of the rise in the groundwater table due to the construction of Greater Thal Canal. The research objective was to analyze land use and land cover (LULC) changes that have altered...

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of smartphone technology in facilitating teaching and learning in Pakistani academic libraries during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Leveraging a questionnaire, we gathered data on students’ experiences, focusing on the challenges encountered, the usability and adoption rates of smartphones, and their impact o...

Pakistan has been facing terrorism for the last two decades, especially after 9/11 and the start of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan. The core objectives of this study are to analyse terrorism spread geographically, and variation in attack intensity values over time using existing and modified attack intensity equations and the impact of differe...

Forests are valuable natural resources, beneficial for the storage of carbon, production of oxygen, protection of soil and controlling the water cycle. Despite forests providing different services to the environment, they are being destroyed at an alarming pace. Forest cover change in Murree, Pakistan over the past few years has created different c...

This Virtual Capacity Building Workshop will be jointly organized by the Survey of Pakistan and Geological Survey of Pakistan with the support of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO). It will be a six-session workshop held over three days. The program is designed to raise and improve awareness, knowledge, and understanding of the regional SD...

Exploring minerals, lithological sequences, and geological formations remained challenging in territorial armed conflict and environmentally hazardous zones. Satellite-based remote sensing is appropriate when direct studies are cumbersome due to boundary problems or morphological strains over large inaccessible regions. Therefore, the main objectiv...

Leaf area index (LAI) and chlorophyll content are efficient plant health and nutrition indicators. However, retrieving these traits is challenging for the multilayered canopy of evergreen fruit trees like Citrus. The spectral reflectance's Red Edge Position (REP) is a surrogate measure of LAI and chlorophyll content. Sentinel-2 (20 m) estimates REP...

Evapotranspiration is an important hydrological parameter that takes place due to water bodies and many physical features (plants, soil) on earth. Punjab lies in the zone of Pakistan that is mostly affected by climate change. A decrease in rainfall and an increase in temperature and potential evapotranspiration (PET) tend toward a more disastrous s...

The current study aimed to investigate the palyno‐morphological features of Asteraceous species from District Dera Ismail Khan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. A total of 13 species were collected, pressed, identified, and examined by using light and scanning electron microscopy. Both qualitative and quantitative pollen characters were observed, that...

Spatial data is one of the core components in all information retrieval processes for decision-making. Spatial data acquisition consumes enormous monetary resources and time. The Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (IGIF) provides a basis and guide for developing, integrating, strengthening, and maximizing geospatial information management...

Agriculture is directly linked to the socioeconomic development of every region. Agriculture impacts us all, whether we are seeking food security, better health or striving to conserve natural resources. Goal 2 of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) underlines the significance of agriculture as a means to achieve food security. United Nations in i...

Successfully conducted capacity building workshop on Regional Spatial Data Infrastructure for sustainable development in ECO countries. Workshop material can be retrieved from: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1as4ZM1wamX4JkziMzKYLVyQbxBBA9DRO

Karakorum glaciers are well known for the advancement and the formation of new glacial lakes due to accelerated climate warming. Its Shimshal valley is profoundly affected by glacier surges in the last couple of decades. Khurdopin glacier is one of the highly surging glaciers in the Karakorum region. Its continuous surge since the nineteenth centur...

Geospatial data are produced by several organizations located at various places, and that is clearly a distributed environment. Many technical and institutional issues need to be resolved to share data in such an environment and to eventually enable regional development. For this matter, many countries implement Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs)...

Geospatially assessing carbon storage is an emerging field inland science and landscape ecology, particularly in the context of the provision of ecosystem services such as global climate regulation. However, modeling the spatial distributions of carbon stocks in the heterogeneous mountainous ecosystems always remained challenging due to fragile, in...

Change of land use and land cover (LULC) has been a key issue of natural resource conservation policies and environmental monitoring. In this study, we used multi-temporal remote sensing data and spatial analysis to assess the land cover changes in Fateh Jhang, Attock District, Pakistan. Landsat 7 (ETM+) for the years 2000, 2005 and 2010 and Landsa...

The growth of Pakistan’s agriculture-based economy depends on elevating agriculture production and raising the per-capita income of rural communities. This paper evaluates the value of two simultaneous initiatives for the economic development of Pakistan, i.e., (i) reforming and modernization of the cadastre system, and (ii) the implementation of n...

Remote sensing provides accurate and cost-effective solution to quantify the biophysical and biochemical traits of citrus fruit orchards. Timely information on these traits can be used to design real-time computerized applications for site-specific orchard management, yield estimation, and scheduling precise and proper application of inputs thus gr...

Identifying scientific collaborations helps in establishing new research policies and linkages among academic institutions. Geographical information system (GIS) research is relatively new in higher education in developing countries. Investigating scholarly communication is challenging for GIS research due to its broad application. Therefore, the m...

Agriculture is directly linked to the socioeconomic development of every region. Agriculture impacts us all, whether we are seeking food security, better health or striving to conserve natural resources. Goal 2 of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) underlines the significance of agriculture as a means to achieve food security. United Nations in i...

Inequalities are usually measured in context of household income to develop policies ensuring equal opportunities to public services for well being. Sustainable Development Goal 10, however, emphasizes the uniform distribution of per-capita food and nutrition intake and percentage share of expenditure on food consumption. Concerning that, evidence-...

In this study, foliar anatomy and pollen morphology of 10 species of Acanthaceae has been investigated using light and scanning electron microscopy. The study was aimed to highlight the role of microscopy in microteaching at community for proper characterization of plants using palyno‐anatomical characters including pollen type, exine sculpturing,...

Amin et al.: Calculation and validation of actual evapotranspiration from satellite derived indices with observed data in delineated agro-climatic zones of Punjab using remote sensing and GIS techniques-4637-APPLIED ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH 18(3):4637-4650. Abstract. Water is the major restrictive constraint for agricultural growth and pr...

The Thal region of Punjab often experiences dry weather conditions with extreme variability in rainfall on a spatiotemporal scale during Rabi cropping season. The current study assesses the impacts of agriculture drought on wheat crops for 2000–2015. MOD13Q1 and CHIRPS data were used for identifying and assessing variation in agricultural drought p...

Leaf area index (LAI) and chlorophyll content (Chl) content are important indicators of plants health and nutrition status. Hyperspectral remote sensing is useful for the real-time estimation of plants biophysical and biochemical traits. The main objective of the current study was to evaluate the potential of red edge position (REP) extracted from...

Cropping conditions in West-Africa are highly spatially and temporally variable. Because of this, a variety of computational models have been developed and used based on understanding agricultural processes at different spatial scales. Farmers and extension workers need scientific tools that allow accessing, combining, and assessing data and models...

Urbanization is the main driver of expanding industry, transport, and buildings at the cost of green spaces in the world’s mega cities. Consequently, an immense land use change is related to local climate modification in urban areas. The process of urbanization in the city of Lahore is posing severe environmental issues such as recent smog events....

The 5th International Conference on Information Management, 24-27 March, 2019 Cambridge, UK

Vulnerability studies often measure the risk that influences a system's ability to react during the occurrence of a hazardous event. Risk is generally associated with the physical, social, and economic aspects of the system. Climate-related hazards such as floods involve an additional spatial dimension, however. It is challenging combining social a...

The purpose of the study is to identify the core mechanism of how social networking sites use happens in the perspective of contextual factors and then examine the cultural difference in the motives for using social networking sites between China and Pakistan university students. An instrument was designed to calculate the various aspect factors an...

Estimation of spatial extent of soil erosion, one of the most serious forms of land degradation, is critical because soil erosion has serious implications on soil fertility, water ecosystem, crop productivity and landscape beauty. The primary objective of the current study was to assess and map the soil erosion intensity and sedimentation yield of...

The present study investigates the space-time impact of climate change on the rice crop calendar in tropical Gujranwala, Pakistan. The climate change impact was quantified through the climatic variables, whereas the existing calendar of the rice crop was compared with the phonological stages of the crop, depicted through the time series of the Norm...

Local communities in mining regions are vulnerable to water scarcity risks caused by extensive mining and changing climate. To mitigate such risks, we adopt a non-market valuation of low income communities’ preferences for improved access to water services, as an effort to develop pro-poor policies that bring long-term water security and benefits t...

Urbanization is one of human induced activities causing land use changes. In recent years, various land usetransformationsin Bangkok influenced the city's ecological sustainability in all means, i.e., diminishing the city's cultivated land and greenery. This study investigates lack of green spaces due to extreme urban growth in the mega city. To do...

The present study was aimed at assessing the groundwater contamination from arsenic (As) and its impact on health from survey data in Lahore, Pakistan. OK (ordinary kriging) technique was used to create As and pH surfaces for samples from 380 groundwater wells at different locations and depths in the study area. Geographic information systems (GIS)...

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to assess the usefulness of digital library (DL) resources and the value of multidisciplinary databases among students. The study discussed perception and usage of digital databases, level of satisfaction, impact on users, factors affecting accessing digital databases, and problems in usage of digital databases...

The present study is the first of its kind as it attempts to ascertain the current status of library and information science (LIS) research from the Chinese perspective, by focusing on English research contributions by Chinese LIS scholars. Leading contributors; individual (author) contributors; institutional contributors, and research collaboratio...

Quality of soil data is vital to formulate agricultural policies at different scales. Current agricultural applications in Pakistan depend however, on average values of soil estimates over larger areas. In this work, model-based ordinary kriging (OK) and Bayesian kriging (BK) to interpolate soil data is used. The aim is to compare the two different...

Satellite observations are addressing agricultural demands at various scales: from the plant level to the national level. Such observations , however, have their specific accuracy, in terms of both their attribute value and their location coordinates. Moreover, their intended use is different. In this chapter, we study the role of satellite images...

Agricultural land needs to be protected for food production. Our objective is to provide a decision support for protecting the agricultural land in Lahore, Pakistan. To do so, first we classified the Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) from Landsat images for the years 2009 and 2012. Second, we performed Markov chain analysis to simulate the LULC change...

Geographical information systems support the application of statistical techniques to map spatially referenced crop data. To do this in the optimal way, errors and uncertainties have to be minimized that are often associated with operations on the data. This paper applies a spatial statistical approach to upscale crop yields from the field level to...

Poverty at the national and sub-national level is commonly mapped on the basis of household surveys. Typical poverty metrics like the head count index are not able to identify its underlaying factors, particularly in rural economies based on subsistence agriculture. This paper relates agro-ecological marginality identified from regional and global...

Cropping conditions in West-Africa are highly spatially and temporally variable. Because of this, a variety of computational models have been developed and used based on understanding agricultural processes at different spatial scales. Farmers and extension workers need scientific tools that allow accessing, combining, and assessing data and models...

Performance of crop yield models is generally evaluated without testing their ability to capture yield spatial variability across a large area. Local soil and environmental conditions or management factors usually cause significant crop yield variability. In West Africa, landscape heterogeneity and data scarcity pose yet additional challenges to cr...

The field of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) has emerged with the spirit of providing 'Data as a Service' to overcome the technical and conceptual barriers in sharing spatial data. In integrated environmental modeling, software components like the GIS, the spatial DBMS, expert rules and analysis tools, and even the associated computational models...

AGILE 2011, April 18-22: Muhammad Imran, Raul Zurita-Milla, Rolf A. de By

Integrated Assessment & Modelling (IAM) requires the integration of diverse and apparently incompatible datasets and process models into a workflow. For such an integration, in geo-information (GI) science, the spatial and temporal scale of data and the modelling scale are two factors of IAM in the context of problems associated with data\slash mod...