Spaced Out ::

John K. Hillier, Geoffrey R. Saville, Mike J. Smith, Alister J. Scott, Emma K. Raven, Jonathon Gascoigne, Louise J. Slater, Nevil Quinn, Andreas Tsanakas, Claire Souch, Gregor C. Leckebusch, Neil Macdonald, Alice M. Milner, Jennifer Loxton13, Rebecca Wilebore, Alexandra Collins, Colin MacKechnie, Jaqui Tweddle, Sarah Moller, MacKenzie Dove, Harry Langford, and Jim Craig (2019)
Geoscience Communication

challenge posed by a heavily time-constrained culture; specifically, tension exists between opportunities presented by working with business and non-optional duties (e.g. administration and teaching). Thus, to justify the time to work with business, such work must inspire curiosity and facilitate future novel science in order to mitigate its conflict with the overriding imperative for academics to publish. It must also provide evidence of real-world changes (i.e. impact), and ideally other reportable outcomes (e.g. official status as a business’ advisor), to feed back into the scientist’s performance appraisals. Indicatively, amid 20-50 key duties, typical full-time scientists may be able to free up to 0.5 day per week for work with business. Thus specific, pragmatic actions, including short-term and time-efficient steps, are proposed in a “user guide” to help initiate and nurture a long-term collaboration between an early- to mid-career environmental scientist and a practitioner in the insurance sector. These actions are mapped back to a tailored typology of impact and a newly created representative set of appraisal criteria to explain how they may be effective, mutually beneficial and overcome barriers. Throughout, the focus is on environmental science, with illustrative detail provided through the example of natural hazard risk modelling in the insurance sector. However, a new conceptual model of academics’ behaviour is developed, fusing perspectives from literature on academics’ motivations and performance assessment, which we propose is internationally applicable and transferable between sectors. Sector-specific details (e.g. list of relevant impacts and user guide) may serve as templates for how people may act differently to work more effectively together.

Mike J. Smith (2018)
Journal of Maps

As a journal we notionally have two overlapping sets of “customers” - readers and authors. Authors provide the content whilst readers consume it. In a subscription funding model, readers pay for journal production, whilst in an open access (OA) model, authors pay. Somewhat uniquely in publishing, advertising plays a very limited part. And akin to commercial publishing, we have an overall journal editor (or Editor-in-Chief) and section editors (or Associate Editors).

Asmau M Ahmed, Olga Duran, Yahya Zweiri and Mike Smith
Remote Sensing

Spectral unmixing is a key process in identifying spectral signature of materials and quantifying their spatial distribution over an image. The linear model is expected to provide acceptable results when two assumptions are satisfied: (1) The mixing process should occur at macroscopic level and (2) Photons must interact with single material before reaching the sensor. However, these assumptions do not always hold and more complex nonlinear models are required. This study proposes a new hybrid method for switching between linear and nonlinear spectral unmixing of hyperspectral data based on artificial neural networks. The neural networks was trained with parameters within a window of the pixel under consideration. These parameters are computed to represent the diversity of the neighboring pixels and are based on the Spectral Angular Distance, Covariance and a non linearity parameter. The endmembers were extracted using Vertex Component Analysis while the abundances were estimated using the method identified by the neural networks (Vertex Component Analysis, Fully Constraint Least Square Method, Polynomial Post Nonlinear Mixing Model or Generalized Bilinear Model). Results show that the hybrid method performs better than each of the individual techniques with high overall accuracy, while the abundance estimation error is significantly lower than that obtained using the individual methods. Experiments on both synthetic dataset and real hyperspectral images demonstrated that the proposed hybrid switch method is efficient for solving spectral unmixing of hyperspectral images as compared to individual algorithms.

James O’Connor, Mike Smith, Mike R. James (2017)
Progress in Physical Geography

Aerial image capture has become very common within the geosciences due to the increasing affordability of low payload (<20 kg) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for consumer markets. Their application to surveying has subsequently led to many studies being undertaken using UAV imagery and derived products as primary data sources. However, image quality and the principles of image capture are seldom given rigorous discussion. In this contribution we firstly revisit the underpinning concepts behind image capture, from which the requirements for acquiring sharp, well exposed and suitable image data are derived. Secondly, the platform, camera, lens and imaging settings relevant to image quality planning are discussed, with worked examples to guide users through the process of considering the factors required for capturing high quality imagery for geoscience investigations.

Given a target feature size and ground sample distance based on mission objectives, flight height and velocity should be calculated to ensure motion blur is kept to a minimum. We recommend using a camera with as big a sensor as is permissible for the aerial platform being used (to maximise sensor sensitivity), effective focal lengths of 24 - 35 mm (to minimize errors due to lens distortion) and optimising ISO (to ensure shutter speed is fast enough to minimise motion blur). Finally, we give recommendations for the reporting of results by researchers in order to help improve the confidence in, and reusability of, surveys through: providing open access imagery where possible, presenting example images and excerpts, and detailing appropriate metadata to rigorously describe the image capture process.

Mike J. Smith (2017)
Journal of Maps

As you will see with this Editorial, it has been a year ofintense activity at the Journal of Maps (JoM). The mostimportant announcement is the move of JoM back toan Open Access (OA) publishing model which waseffective from 1st September 2016.