An exploratory spatial analysis of western medical services in Republican Beijing

In this paper, we reconstructed the spatial organization of Western medical services in Beijing city during the Republican period using a recently completed Republican Beijing GIS dataset. The primary objective is to explore the utility of spatial analytical methods, such as hotspot analysis and geographically weighted regression (GWR), in studying the spatial patterns of Western medical services. Our study is successful in depicting the spatial structure of Western medical services in the city. In addition, our analysis offers a preliminary but holistic view of the spatial relationships between Western medical services in the city and traditional Chinese medicine, population distribution, temple locations and industry-commerce patterns.     

太湖流域重污染区土地利用变化对生态系统服务价值的影响

通过对太湖流域重污染区1999年、2007年遥感影像数据解译结果的分析,获取了太湖流域重污染区主要土地利用类型的信息,分析了8 a来研究区内土地利用与覆被变化趋势,对区域土地利用类型的生态系统服务价值进行评估。结果表明,1999~2007年,太湖流域重污染区内耕地面积从2 033.53 km2减少到1 401.04 km2,而林地、建设用地、园地、水域总体呈增加的趋势,其中减少的耕地主要转化为建设用地。1999~2007年太湖流域重污染区的生态系统服务价值呈减少趋势,土地利用变化使研究区生态资产减少了2.40亿元,除气体调节和原材料以外,各单项服务功能的价值量均呈现递减的趋势。     

基于用户偏好的多维地理信息服务质量评价模型

为了解决目前地理信息服务质量量化评价的问题,构建了一种基于用户偏好的多维地理信息服务质量评价模型。扩展通用服务质量属性,构建了多维地理信息服务质量模型;在多维地理信息服务质量模型的基础上加入用户偏好,构建了基于用户偏好的多维地理信息服务质量评价模型;实现了基于用户偏好的QoS权重计算,并给出了服务QoS综合值的计算方法。最后给出了基于用户偏好的多维地理信息服务质量评价实例。     

我国气象服务效益评估业务的现状与展望

气象服务是气象事业的出发点和归宿点,因而采用科学客观的方法开展气象服务效益的评估工作,有利于气象部门更好地改进和完善气象服务,促进气象事业的持续快速发展。本文介绍了我国气象服务效益评估业务的现状,并对气象服务效益评估业务的未来发展趋势进行了构想,指出规范化、常态化、人性化服务是未来气象服务效益评估业务的发展趋势。     

Conceptualizing food systems for global environmental change research

This paper outlines a framework for studying the multiple interactions of broadly defined food systems with global environmental change and evaluating the major societal outcomes affected by these interactions: food security, ecosystem services and social welfare. In building the framework the paper explores and synthesizes disparate literature on food systems food security and global environmental change, bridging social science and natural science perspectives. This collected evidence justifies a representation of food systems, which can be used to identify key processes and determinants of food security in a given place or time, particularly the impacts of environmental change. It also enables analysis of the feedbacks from food system outcomes to drivers of environmental and social change, as well as tradeoffs among the food system outcomes themselves. In food systems these tradeoffs are often between different scales or levels of decision-making or management, so solutions to manage them must be context-specific. With sufficient empirical evidence, the framework could be used to build a database of typologies of food system interactions useful for different management or analytical purposes.     

Dealing with drought: The challenge of using water system technologies to break dryland poverty traps

We explore strategies among farmers in semi-arid Tanzania to cope with drought, and investigate if access to a local supplemental irrigation system (the Ndiva system) can improve coping capacity. Results show high dependency on local ecosystem services when harvests fail, and indicate that farmers commonly exhaust asset holdings during droughts. Ndiva access did not have any direct effects on coping capacity, but seemed to have some indirect effects. Drawing on our findings we discuss the complexity of escaping persistent dryland poverty, and outline the circumstances under which small-scale water system technologies, such as Ndiva irrigation, may help.     

Scale mismatches and their ecological and economic effects on landscapes: A spatially explicit model

Mismatches between the spatial scales of human decision-making and natural processes contribute to environmental problems such as global warming and biodiversity losses. People damage the environment through local activities like clearing land or burning fossil fuels, but the damages only become manifest at larger regional or global scales where no one pays for them. Payments for ecological services like carbon sequestration can correct for these damages caused by scale mismatches. This paper presents a spatially explicit land-use model to investigate the consequences of scale mismatches for pollination and carbon storage services and examine the effect of payment for only carbon storage services. The model integrates processes in multiple spatial scales ranging from the parcel level used by landowners’ decision about deforestation, to the larger scale used by animals to pollinate plants, and finally to the global scale where carbon storage services are supplied. We show that payment for carbon storage services can become an effective mechanism to protect forests at the same time that it creates inequities among landowners in income level.These findings suggest that market-based approaches that focus on conservation of a single ecosystem service may reproduce unequal power relations among landowners.     

Assessment of the management of organizations supplying ecosystem services from tropical forests

Global environmental change leads to degradation of tropical forests in many countries. In response to this pressure, programs for payments for ecosystem services (PES) are developing and organizations are emerging which manage forests in order to supply ecosystem services, rather than only harvest timber. Typically such services are carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, pollination, and watershed protection. Public or private actors interested to invest in or donate money for the provisioning of such services are faced with the problem of choosing the appropriate organization supplying ecosystem services. The goal of this paper was to develop an assessment framework based on the balanced scorecard concept including drivers, impact, performance and context variables. Results of a survey of international market actors were used to determine assessment criteria and their weights. Putting the focus of this paper on drivers and impacts, we assessed Latin American organizations that “sell” ecosystem services from tropical forests in terms of their general management, marketing, forest management, client and stakeholder satisfaction, and forest ecosystem status. We found that supplying organizations vary widely with respect to their achievements in these areas. However, the variance of assessment results is influenced even more by the variance in weights the international market actors allocate to the assessment criteria. The insights of this study can contribute to the continuous improvement of management processes in supplying organizations and can support investors and donors in their decision-making with respect to organization supplying ecosystem services.     

地理本体及其应用初探

将本体论的思想和方法引入到地理信息领域,提出了本体论在地理信息科学中的确切含义,并阐述了建立地理本体的意义。重点研究了基于本体的地理信息服务,并在对各种本体表示语言进行分析比较之后,选择最有发展前景的OWL语言构建了一些简单的地理本体,用实例说明如何将本体应用到地理信息服务中。     

Pedestrian network generation based on crowdsourced tracking data

ABSTRACT

Pedestrian networks play an important role in various applications, such as pedestrian navigation services and mobility modeling. This paper presents a novel method to extract pedestrian networks from crowdsourced tracking data based on a two-layer framework. This framework includes a walking pattern classification layer and a pedestrian network generation layer. In the first layer, we propose a multi-scale fractal dimension (MFD) algorithm in order to recognize the two different types of walking patterns: walking with a clear destination (WCD) or walking without a clear destination (WOCD). In the second layer, we generate the pedestrian network by combining the pedestrian regions and pedestrian paths. The pedestrian regions are extracted based on a modified connected component analysis (CCA) algorithm from the WOCD traces. We generate the pedestrian paths using a kernel density estimation (KDE)-based point clustering algorithm from the WCD traces. The pedestrian network generation results using two actual crowdsourced datasets show that the proposed method has good performance in both geometrical correctness and topological correctness.