Cartographic user interface design models for mobile Location-Based Services applications

Mobile Location-Based Services (mLBS) offer a unique combination of digital content, portability, interactivity, location-awareness and real-time information delivery, providing increased convenience and support for everyday geospatial decision-making tasks, compared to more traditional printed maps and digital cartographic products. In spite of their benefits, however, limitations inherent within mLBS technology (e.g. small screens), along with the dynamic and changeable contexts in which they are used, impact on their effectiveness for communicating geospatial information to end users and, in turn, their overall acceptance. Identifying usefulness (i.e. utility and usability) as a key factor influencing the acceptance of mLBS products, this thesis details the investigation of techniques and a methodology for designing mLBS applications that communicate geospatial information in a useful manner to non-expert, general public users. The research presented here focuses on the usefulness of the entire cartographic user interface (UI) for mLBS applications – i.e. those components that are specifically concerned with the access and representation of, and interaction with, geospatial information – differentiating it from related mLBS research and application design. Particular emphasis was placed on the usefulness of the interplay between various geospatial components of the cartographic UI, in support of a broad range of everyday geospatial tasks for non-expert users. Contributing to this, a wide array of alternative techniques for representing, presenting and interacting with geospatial information were explored. To achieve its aims, the study adopted a qualitative User-Centred Design (UCD) methodology, involving an early focus on users and their tasks, empirical measurement of usage, and iterative design and evaluation, which together ensured that all design efforts were firmly grounded in the needs and characteristics of the end users. Necessarily focused on a specific application area (tourism) and an associated user group (travellers), the UCD process employed by the research was more comprehensive than had previously been undertaken within the cartographic discipline. The primary results of the research comprise a set of cartographic UI design models for communicating geospatial information in a useful manner to the non-expert users of a tourism-related mLBS application. These incorporate a range of alternative cartographic representation, presentation and interaction techniques considered useful by representative users, with egocentric maps arguably holding the greatest importance. The wider benefits of the design models are expected to be twofold: firstly, they offer a structural foundation to researchers and developers seeking to produce useful cartographic UIs for tourism-related mLBS applications; and secondly, they provide guidance regarding specific cartographic representation, presentation and interaction techniques that offer utility and usability in particular contexts. In addition, a number of secondary research outputs offer other benefits to the scientific and commercial mLBS communities. These include the UCD research methodology – which presents a proven guide for ensuring usefulness during the design of mLBS applications in general – and a set of general recommendations for designing useful mLBS applications – which offer assistance for specific design activities while contributing empirical results to the future development of mLBS application design guidelines

Six decades of changes in the riparian corridor of a Mediterranean river: A synthetic analysis based on historical data sources

Riparian corridors in semi-arid Mediterranean environments are ecosystems of high biodiversity and complexity. However, they are threatened because of high levels of human intervention. River damming and related flow manipulation is considered as one of the most prominent human impacts on riparian corridors. This study combines historical time series information on river flows and their human manipulation, historical aerial images depicting changes in riparian land cover and ground observations of the species - age composition and morphology of the riparian corridor of a Mediterranean river (the Mijares River, Eastern Spain) over the last 60years. In this sense, we explored how to integrate information from a wide variety of data sources, and we extracted a variety of indices and undertook analyses that identified and summarized spatio-temporal changes in riparian structure and in the driving flow processes. Results revealed an increase in the cover and density of woody vegetation and a decrease in bare sediment areas (essential for recruitment of riparian pioneer species), with a synchronous reduction in the complexity of the riparian corridor of the middle reaches of the Mijares River. These vegetation changes have accompanied a decrease in the magnitude and variability of river flows over the last six decades, with higher severity since dam closure. This study illustrates the effectiveness of combining disparate historical data sources and the effectiveness of processing these sources to extract informative metrics that can improve the understanding and management of riparian systems. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The authors are grateful to Paula De Lamo (who worked in an early version of this study), Carlos Gonzalez-Hidalgo (who gave us access to the MOPREDAS database) and Alicia Garcia-Arias and Oscar Belmar (for their support in the calculation of confusion matrices and in the flow regime analysis, respectively). We also thank Confederacion Hidrografica del Jucar (Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment) and the professors Juan Marco Segura and Javier Paredes for the hydrological data provided to develop this study. TECNOMA S. A. provided logistic support. Finally, we acknowledge the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia for the two grants of the Support Programme for Research and Development 'Programa de Apoyo a la Investigacion y Desarrollo' (PAID 00-10 and 00-11). This study was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness with the projects 'Recent environmental changes in fluvial systems: morphological and sedimentological consequences' (CGL2009-14220-C02-02-BTE) and SCARCE (Consolider-Ingenio 2010 CSD2009-00065). The feedback of two anonymous reviewers has been very helpful and is greatly appreciated.Garófano-Gómez, V.; Martinez-Capel, F.; Bertoldi, W.; Gurnell, Á.; Estornell Cremades, J.; Segura-Beltrán, F. (2012). Six decades of changes in the riparian corridor of a Mediterranean river: A synthetic analysis based on historical data sources. Ecohydrology. 0:0-0. https://doi.org/10.1002/eco.1330S00

Quantitative methods for hydrological spatial field comparison

© 2006 Dr. Stephen Russell WealandsThis thesis addresses the current lack of comprehensive, quantitative methods for comparing hydrological spatial fields. Comparison of spatial fields is needed for assessing hydrological models and for data assimilation. The methods that are currently used for quantitative comparison generally fail to consider the spatial arrangement of element values within spatial fields. Instead, there is a dependence on qualitative methods (e.g. visual comparison) to undertake comparison of many aspects (e.g. intermediate scale features), but such methods are non-repeatable, often biased and difficult to report on. This thesis advances the comparison methods available for use with hydrological spatial fields. (For complete abstract open document

Modeling spatial patterns of saturated areas: a comparison of the topographic wetness index and a dynamic distributed model

Topography is often one of the major controls on the spatial pattern of saturated areas, which in turn is a key to understanding much of the variability in soils, hydrological processes, and stream water quality. The topographic wetness index (TWI) has become a widely used tool to describe wetness conditions at the catchment scale. With this index, however, it is assumed that groundwater gradients always equal surface gradients. To overcome this limitation, we suggest deriving wetness indices based on simulations of distributed catchment models. We compared these new indices with the TWI and evaluated the different indices by their capacity to predict spatial patterns of saturated areas. Results showed that the modelderived wetness indices predicted the spatial distribution of wetlands significantly better than the TWI. These results encourage the use of a dynamic distributed hydrological model to derive wetness index maps for hydrological landscape analysis in catchments with topographically driven groundwater tables

Use and users of multimedia cartography

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Environmental flows planning to improve ecological realism and address operational reality

Environmental flow studies typically define a single minimum flow regime required to support ecological processes based on the required frequency, timing and duration of particular flow events within each year, irrespective of prevailing climate conditions. However, this approach overlooks natural inter-annual hydrologic variability, and has resulted in the frequent inability to meet recommended flows during dry periods (environmental shortfalls), and led to seemingly excessive entitlements during wet periods. In this paper we present a case study for the Wimmera River (Victoria, Australia) in which an assessment of inter-annual variability in ecological water requirements was used to define four distinctive flow-regimes matched to the prevailing climatic conditions. The climatic conditions spanned drought years to wet years and were defined based on a simple quartile split of a long-term modelled predevelopment flow. We characterised the modelled predevelopment flow patterns associated with each of the defined climate conditions, and identified the specific ecological and physical processes (such as species recruitment and channel formation) for which such flow variability was considered important. The analyses presented here compare the total environmental water demand (defined in terms of managed releases from storage and quantified using eflow Predictor) for both the annually variable approach, and the more typical annually averaged approach. While the long-term water demand was similar for the two approaches, annual watering requirements under the climatically specific allocation rules differed by up to three-fold, and resulted in much reduced environmental flows during dry periods, and substantially longer high flow spells during wet years. From a water management perspective environmental demand is much reduced in dry years when water costs are typically high and shortfalls more likely. Inclusion of inter-annual variability thus leads to recommendations reflecting the 'boom and bust' nature of many river systems, while also being more parsimonious with inter-annual variability in operational water availability and water costs.No Full Tex