Center for Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing (CEARS)
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The mission of the Center for Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing (CEARS) at Virginia Tech is to provide interdisciplinary leadership in remote sensing through formal instruction, outreach, cooperative research, and consulting. CEARS contributes to applications of the science and technology necessary to better understand effects of both natural and human-induced variability and change within the Earth system.
CEARS focuses on three pressing priorities:
- to further our understanding of the Earth’s major biogeochemical cycles
- to improve understanding of the factors affecting biological diversity and ecosystem structure and functioning
- to develop a systematic understanding of changes in land uses and land cover that are critical to ecosystem functioning and services and, human welfare.
Co-Directors: Valerie Thomas and Yang Shao
Collections in this community
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Scholarly Works, Center for Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing (CEARS) [10]
Research articles, presentations, and other scholarship
Recent Submissions
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Southern pine productivity: Effects of carbon dioxide increases and related predicted temperature and precipitation changes
(2017-05-16)Forest ecological forecasting results and decision support tools are now available to foresters in the southern United States. -
Mining disturbances in Virginia's southwestern coalfield, 1984-2011
(2015-06-01)Coal mining has been taking place in southwestern Virginia's Appalachian coalfield for more than a century, and surface mining has been a common method of coal extraction since the 1960s. Coal surface mining creates a ... -
The Garmin eTrex Legend: An Introductory Handbook for Natural Resource Professionals and Educators
(Virginia Cooperative Extension, 2005-09-01)This handbook is intended to provide users with a basic understanding of how your Garmin Legend GPS receiver can help to support your day-to-day business needs. -
USA PhotoMaps: a User Guide for Natural Resource Professionals and Educators
(Virginia Cooperative Extension, 2011-09-05)USAPhotoMaps requires that you know how to operate a GPS unit and organize and collect field data associated with a GPS unit. This free software package enables you to download GPS waypoints (or tracks) from your GPS ... -
Terrain Navigator: a User Guide for Natural Resource Professionals
(Virginia Cooperative Extension, 2005-09-01)An introduction to the standard edition of Terrain Navigator, an easy-to-use mapping program for managing and manipulating topographic maps and GPS information. -
Producing a Canopy Height Map Over a Large Region Using Heterogeneous LIDAR Datasets
(2014)Accurate and unbiased wall-to-wall canopy height maps for large regions are useful to forest scientists and managers for several reasons such as carbon accounting and wildfire fuel-load monitoring. Airborne lidar is ... -
Accuracy Assessment of the NLCD 2006 Impervious Surface for Roanoke and Blacksburg
(2014)Impervious surface map products are important for the study of urbanization, urban heat island effects, watershed hydrology, water pollution, and ecosystem services in general. At the conterminous US scale, impervious ... -
Mapping Stable Nitrogen Isotopes Using Hyperspectral Imagery
(2014)As nitrogen deposition increases globally, ecosystem changes will occur. It is important to understand the growth response of different ecosystems and where nitrogen retention will occur. Stable isotopes of foliar nitrogen ... -
Crowds for Clouds: Using an Internet Workforce to Interpret Satellite Images
(2014)A chronologically ordered sequence of satellite images can be used to learn how natural features of the landscape change over time. For example, we can learn how forests react to human interventions or climate change. ... -
Investigating Forest Conversion Across Several Scales of Urbanization in the Eastern United States
(2014)Urbanization in the United States has clearly impacted land cover, and land use and land cover change (LULCC) patterns. A great body of literature has addressed the negative results of increased sprawl and a supporting ... -
Analysis of Crop Phenology Using Time-Series MODIS Data and Climate Data
(2014)Understanding crop phenology is fundamental to agricultural production, management, planning and decision-making. In the continental United States, key phenological stages are strongly influenced by meteorological and ... -
A model using marginal efficiency of investment to analyze carbon and nitrogen interactions in terrestrial ecosystems
(European Geosciences Union, 2014-09-12)Carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles are coupled in terrestrial ecosystems through multiple processes including photosynthesis, tissue allocation, respiration, N fixation, N uptake, and decomposition of litter and soil organic ... -
On-the-Fly Massively Multitemporal Change Detection Using Statistical Quality Control Charts and Landsat Data
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2014-06)One challenge to implementing spectral change detection algorithms using multitemporal Landsat data is that key dates and periods are often missing from the record due to weather disturbances and lapses in continuous ... -
The Virginia GIS County Data Series
(Virginia Cooperative Extension, 2009-05-01)Details the extensive collection of GIS data available from the Virginia GIS County Data Series which provides users with some of the most up-to-date and accurate framework data available on counties in the Commonwealth. -
GPS Utility: a User Guide for Natural Resource Professionals and Educators
(Virginia Cooperative Extension, 2009-05-01)An introduction to GPS Utility, an easy-to-use software application for managing, manipulating, and mapping your GPS information. -
Landscape Dynamics on the Island of La Gonave, Haiti, 1990-2010
(MDPI, 2013-09-16)The island of La Gonave lies northwest of Port-au-Prince and is representative of the subsistence Haitian lifestyle. Little is known about the land cover changes and conversion rates on La Gonave. Using Landsat images from ... -
An Adaptive Noise Filtering Algorithm for AVIRIS Data with Implications for Classification Accuracy
(Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2008), TR-08-15This paper describes a new algorithm used to adaptively filter a remote sensing dataset based on signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) once the maximum noise fraction (MNF) has been applied. This algorithm uses Hermite splines to ... -
Continuous Iterative Guided Spectral Class Rejection Classification Algorithm: Part 2
(Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2009), TR-09-10This paper describes in detail the continuous iterative guided spectral class rejection (CIGSCR) classification method based on the iterative guided spectral class rejection (IGSCR) classification method for remotely sensed ...