Interannual Variability in Pollen Dispersal and Deposition on the Tropical Quelccaya Ice Cap*

Pollen collected from snow samples on the Quelccaya Ice Cap in 2000 and 2001 reveals significant interannual variability in pollen assemblage, concentration, and provenance. Samples from 2000, a La Niña year, contain high pollen concentrations and resemble samples from the Andean forests (Yungas) to the east. Samples from 2001, an El Niño year, contain fewer pollen and resemble those from the Altiplano. We suggest that varying wind patterns under different El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions may affect the processes of pollen transport over the Altiplano and on the ice cap, although confounding variables such as flowering phenology and sublimation should also be considered     

Clinoform architecture and along‐strike facies variability through an exhumed erosional to accretionary basin margin transition

Exhumed basin margin‐scale clinothems provide important archives for understanding process interactions and reconstructing the physiography of sedimentary basins. However, studies of coeval shelf through slope to basin‐floor deposits are rarely documented, mainly due to outcrop or subsurface dataset limitations. Unit G from the Laingsburg depocentre (Karoo Basin, South Africa) is a rare example of a complete basin margin scale clinothem (>60 km long, 200 m‐high), with >10 km of depositional strike control, which allows a quasi‐3D study of a preserved shelf‐slope‐basin floor transition over a ca. 1,200 km² area. Sand‐prone, wave‐influenced topset deposits close to the shelf‐edge rollover zone can be physically mapped down dip for ca. 10 km as they thicken and transition into heterolithic foreset/slope deposits. These deposits progressively fine and thin over tens of km farther down dip into sand‐starved bottomset/basin‐floor deposits. Only a few km along strike, the coeval foreset/slope deposits are bypass‐dominated with incisional features interpreted as minor slope conduits/gullies. The margin here is steeper, more channelized and records a stepped profile with evidence of sand‐filled intraslope topography, a preserved base‐of‐slope transition zone and sand‐rich bottomset/basin‐floor deposits. Unit G is interpreted as part of a composite depositional sequence that records a change in basin margin style from an underlying incised slope with large sand‐rich basin‐floor fans to an overlying accretion‐dominated shelf with limited sand supply to the slope and basin floor. The change in margin style is accompanied with decreased clinoform height/slope and increased shelf width. This is interpreted to reflect a transition in subsidence style from regional sag, driven by dynamic topography/inherited basement configuration, to early foreland basin flexural loading. Results of this study caution against reconstructing basin margin successions from partial datasets without accounting for temporal and spatial physiographic changes, with potential implications on predictive basin evolution models.     

土壤微生物结皮对两种一年生植物幼苗存活和生长的影响

在温室实验和野外调查中,分析了两种一年生草本植物小画眉草(Eragrostics poaeoides)和雾冰藜(Bassia dasyphylla)的幼苗在苔藓结皮、藻结皮和流沙上的存活和生长状况。两种植物的幼苗存活率均表现出在苔藓结皮上最高而在流沙基质中最低。两种植物幼苗存活率与土壤表层水分含量呈正相关关系。与小画眉草相比较,雾冰藜的幼苗在萌发后根生长较为迅速,在3种土壤类型中和干湿两种水分处理下,雾冰藜较小画眉草均具有较高的幼苗存活率。在干燥处理下,生长在有结皮土壤中的两种植物的植株干重大约是生长在无结皮土壤中植株的5倍。增加水分能降低植株幼苗的死亡率,促进植株生长;增加水分也能在一定程度上减弱因土壤基质差异对幼苗存活和幼苗生长的影响。因此,在自然状况下年降雨量的多少和分配状况的差异可能会影响这两种植物每年幼苗存活率和生长状况的差异,进而会影响到这两个种群在人工固沙区盖度和分布格局的差异性。     

Bringing the other into political ecology: Reflecting on preoccupations in a research field

For all its vitality political ecology often appears to be a project in which work by Anglo‐Americans in particular, if it is not privileged, certainly predominates. This trend reflects wider language and intellectual tendencies in human geography and the social sciences that distort the development of the field by downplaying or obscuring the contributions of many non‐Anglo‐Americans and by naturalizing Anglo‐American assumptions at the heart of research. The latter in turn determine what constitutes ‘good’ work – even as there is no single definition of political ecology. Arguing against this tendency, this paper draws on postcolonial thinking to emphasize the need to reassess and reorient the field as ‘other’ political ecologies are feasible and desirable.     

Rapid generation of Digital Elevation Models from topographic maps

Abstract

In this article we demonstrate that substantial gains in time can be made when using point sampling rather than contour line digitising for generation of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). A simple sampling scheme, based on regularly distributed points, was used supplemented with points near break-lines in the terrain. An evaluation of surfaces created with three different interpolation methods at three different resolutions shows that the statistical distribution was better when using points as opposed to contours, and that the accuracy was comparable despite the much smaller amount of input data.     

Watermarking of digital geospatial datasets: a review of technical,legal and copyright issues

Gathering data accounts for more than 80% of the cost of any GIS project. Fast Internet connections and digital datasets threaten the investments of data producers through data piracy. Outside the GIS community this problem has been known for a long time, and possible solutions exist for digital imagery, formatted text, 3D meshes and so on, showing possible links to typical spatial data. This is largely achieved through embedding hidden information in a dataset without producing perceptible changes in the data, a process known as watermarking. The producer can recover the embedded information on request in order to produce evidence of ownership in a court, so the overall strategy relies on a legal basis rather than technical ones. This paper analyses the state-of-the-art for watermarking protection in digital geographical datasets. Digital imagery is demonstrably a more mature area than geographical information, even with multiple commercial vendors offering watermarking protection. 2D vector and point datasets have received less attention from the research community; however, 3D meshes have been considered by the CAD community and a handful of techniques are available for that case, and they are reviewed here.     

Wavelet triangulated irregular networks

GIS applications have recently begun to emerge on the Internet. The management of three-dimensional geographic datasets in this distributed environment poses a particularly challenging problem, which highlights the need for a good data representation. This paper presents a new multiresolution data representation: the Wavelet Triangulated Irregular Network (WTIN). Compared to the traditional cell-based Digital Elevation Model (DEM) format and the Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) format, it is more compact and suitable for scalable distributed GIS services. This format is based on the second-generation wavelet theory and is specially designed for geographical height field data. The modified Butterfly scheme is used for constructing the wavelet transform. For every point in the geographic surface, only a single wavelet coefficient is used, which makes the final data representation very efficient and easy to compress. Because the transform used in the data representation is a linear filter operation, the computational efficiency is better than other multiresolution data formats for terrain surfaces. Results from numerical experiments on real data are given to demonstrate that the proposed data representation can be efficiently implemented. The results show that the proposed WTIN data format can provide multiresolution data sets, which achieve significant compression while preserving geographical features. The quality is found to be quite acceptable for geographical terrain representation.