Coiling direction is a basic characteristic of trochospiral planktic foraminifera. Modifications in the coiling direction within ancient planktic foraminiferal populations may reflect important changes in evolution or environment, yet they remain scarcely discussed. Here we investigate fluctuations in the coiling direction within Morozovella assemblages from sections that span the interval of peak

Interpreting the similarities and dissimilarities in spatiotemporal variations and various controls between surface and canopy urban heat islands (UHIs) is critical for a better understanding of their vertical structure. Preceding comparisons of the surface UHI (SUHI) and canopy UHI (CUHI), however, remain mostly restricted either in a single city or over a few cities within limited background climates;

Semantic segmentation of remotely sensed imagery plays a critical role in many real-world applications, such as environmental change monitoring, precision agriculture, environmental protection, and economic assessment. Following rapid developments in sensor technologies, vast numbers of fine-resolution satellite and airborne remote sensing images are now available, for which semantic segmentation is

Detecting the arbitrary-oriented objects in aerial images is a significant yet challenging task in remote sensing image analysis. Existing methods generally use the oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) as Region of Interests (RoIs) to detect aerial objects, and learn the orientation angle information of objects under the supervision of OBB annotations. However, directly learning the orientation angle suffers

Global tectonic and climatic models for the Permian-Triassic boundary (PTB) are highly debated. One of the most disputed topics is the temperature increase associated with CO2 emissions generated by the Siberian Trap volcanism and its potential influence on chemical weathering and associated variations in sediment fluxes. By integrating crustal architecture, plate modelling, structural kinematics,

Burgess Shale-type biotas have been widely reported from the Cambrian in North America, Siberia, Greenland, China, and Australia; they are crucial in reconstructing the biotic evolution and ecological interactions of early metazoans. Here, we report an atypical Burgess Shale-type fossil assemblage from the Shilongdong Formation (Cambrian Stage 4) in the Jingshan area, central Hubei Province, South

The Minimal Detectable Displacement (MDD) is an important measure of monitoring networks sensitivity to displacements. In addition to the accuracy criteria, it is used as a detectability criterion in the optimal design of such networks. The paper examines whether the MDD provides grounds for verifying the correctness of the confidence, and the significance thresholds applied in the analyses of the

Sun glint contamination is a significant problem for high-resolution remote sensing over aquatic environments. Sun glint is a particular issue for researchers using aerial imagery to assess shallow water benthic communities, as it may be wrongly classified as benthic substrates of interest. Although various methods are available to correct for sun glint using multispectral and hyperspectral imagery

The 3D reconstruction of objects is a prerequisite for many highly relevant applications of computer vision such as mobile robotics or autonomous driving. To deal with the inverse problem of reconstructing 3D objects from their 2D projections, a common strategy is to incorporate prior object knowledge into the reconstruction approach by establishing a 3D model and aligning it to the 2D image plane

Line segment matching for wide-baseline images is challenging due to the significant viewpoint differences. In this study, we propose a hierarchical line segment matching method based on viewpoint robust local structure and geometric constraints. In our approach, line segments are paired and classified into three types representing heuristically those with different level of matchability: structured

The accelerating sea-ice, ice sheet and glacial melt associated with climate warming have resulted in important changes in the Arctic region over the past decades. In northern Baffin Bay, the formation of the North Open Water (NOW) polynya, which is intrinsically linked to regional sea-ice conditions and ocean circulation, has become more variable in recent years. To understand how climate-driven changes

The Ediacaran Period (ca. 635–541 Ma) witnessed the earliest paleontological evidence for macroscopic animals (i.e., Ediacara biota) and geochemical observations of the largest carbon cycle anomaly in Earth history (i.e., Shuram Excursion, SE). Numerous hypotheses have been proposed for the origins of the SE, ranging from primary seawater anomaly to syn- or post-depositional diagenesis. Despite intensive

Digital surface models (DSM) generated from multi-stereo satellite images are getting higher in quality owing to the improved data resolution and photogrammetric reconstruction algorithms. Very-high-resolution (VHR, with sub-meter level resolution) satellite images effectively act as a unique data source for 3D building modeling, because it provides a much wider data coverage with lower cost than the

Increased cultural eutrophication since the 20th century, caused by phosphorus (P) enrichment, has become a major problem worldwide. In deep, stratified lakes, eutrophication-induced hypolimnetic anoxia often stimulates the release of labile P from the sediment into the water column. This positive feedback, termed internal P loading, maintains or even accelerates eutrophication. However, most studies

Arctic Ocean surface circulation plays an important role in the global ocean circulation system. In recent years, its position and velocity have been changing constantly, attracting increasing attention. The cause of this change, however, is still a matter of disagreement. In this paper, we use empirical orthogonal function analysis (EOF) to analyze the spatial and temporal distributions of sea level

Persistent scatterer interferometric synthetic aperture radar (PS-InSAR) is a widely used technique for local ground deformation estimation due to its millimetric accuracy and full-resolution results. However, with the enhancement of data acquisition capability of the SAR sensors, larger coverage and higher temporal-spatial resolution of SAR images can cause explosive increase and uneven distribution

This paper presents a road detection and tracking technique using polarization characteristics of the road in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) spectrum. Conventional vision-based road detection techniques often apply color and texture information, which tend to underperform in low illumination conditions at night. The Division of Focal Plane (DoFP) infrared polarization imaging technology enables real-time

Accurate seismic risk modeling requires knowledge of key structural characteristics of buildings. However, to date, the collection of such data is highly expensive in terms of labor, time and money and thus prohibitive for a spatially continuous large-area monitoring. This study quantitatively evaluates the potential of an automated and thus more efficient collection of vulnerability-related structural

Reconstructing sediment load in deep-time is one of the greatest challenges in the reconstruction of ancient sediment routing systems, particularly because solid statistical models are absent and paleo-climatic, paleo-tectonic, and sedimentary constraints are lacking. This study proposes a reliable workflow for the estimation of paleo-sediment fluxes (Qs) applying the BQART model to a case study from

Road detection based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has achieved remarkable performances for very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. However, this approach relies on massive annotated samples, and the problem of limited generalization for unseen images still remains. The manual pixel-level labeling process is also extremely time-consuming, and the performance of CNNs degrades significantly

Planktonic foraminiferal population dynamics and benthic foraminiferal and radiolaria distributions combined with δ13C and δ18O measurements of both bulk carbonate and foraminifera provide clues concerning the paleoceanographic changes across the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary interval and the Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 (OAE 2) at southern high latitudes. Samples analyzed are from Integrated Ocean Discovery

The Global climate reorganisation in the late Pliocene linked to enhancement of the Atlantic Ocean Thermohaline Circulation (AOTC), instigated a transition to glacial-interglacial cyclicity in the Quaternary. Enhancement of the AOTC amplified atmospheric precipitation over the Eurasian interior strengthening Northern Hemisphere Glaciation. Increased rainfall on the vast Russian Plain drained into the

The Sentinel-6 (or Jason-CS) altimetry mission provides a long-term extension of the Topex and Jason-1/2/3 missions for ocean surface topography monitoring. Analysis of altimeter data relies on highly-accurate knowledge of the orbital position and requires radial RMS orbit errors of less than 1.5 cm. For precise orbit determination (POD), the Sentinel-6A spacecraft is equipped with a dual-constellation

Microbial sulfate reduction (MSR) and microbial iron reduction (MIR) are two major anaerobic metabolic pathways, and account for the majority of anaerobic organic matter degradation in modern marine sediments. Because it is thermodynamically more favorable, the zone of porewater Fe2+ accumulation usually overlies the zone of porewater H2S accumulation in modern marine sediments. The sequence of redox

Investigation of the end-Permian mass extinction (EPME) has been greatly facilitated by high-resolution conodont biostratigraphic studies. To date, however, a detailed biostratigraphic framework has been lacking for shallow-marine successions of the Tethys region. In the present study, we analyzed carbonate microfacies, conodont biostratigraphy, and carbonate carbon isotopes of the Yangou Quarry section

Marine influence on low-salinity environments can trigger aquatic ecosystem shifts, including biodiversity turnovers. High-resolution palaeoenvironmental records of marine connection events are particularly valuable, as they provide natural laboratories to understand analogous oceanographic and biodiversity turnover events in present-day climate- and anthropogenically-induced incursions. One such incursion

In this contribution, we introduce a generalized Kalman filter with precision in recursive form when the stochastic model is misspecified. The filter allows for a relaxed dynamic model in which not all state vector elements are connected in time. The filter is equipped with a recursion of the actual error-variance matrices so as to provide an easy-to-use tool for the efficient and rigorous precision

In recent strapdown airborne and shipborne gravimetry campaigns with servo accelerometers of the widely used Q-Flex type, results have been impaired by heading-dependent measurement errors. This paper shows that the effect is, in all likelihood, caused by the sensitivity of the Q-Flex type sensor to the Earth’s magnetic field. In order to assess the influence of magnetic fields on the utilised strapdown

The International Height Reference System (IHRS), adopted by International Association of Geodesy (IAG) in its Resolution No. 1 at the XXVI General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) in Prague in 2015, contains two novelties. Firstly, the mean-tide concept is adopted for handling the permanent tide. While many national height systems continue to apply the mean-tide

Vehicle detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery plays a crucial role in a variety of applications. However, UAVs are usually small, very maneuverable, and can take images from a variety of viewpoints and heights, leading to large differences in vehicle appearance and size. To address the vehicle detection challenge with such diversity in UAV images, we seek to align features between different

The global occurrence of parabolic dunes and their reactivation potential make them significant features in the present global landscape. Several studies have assessed the distribution and structure of parabolic dunes and their relationship to local climate factors with the aim to constrain the processes influencing their activation and potential reactivation. However, none of them have addressed the

The article Integrated processing of ground- and space-based GPS observations: improving GPS satellite orbits observed with sparse ground networks, written by Wen Huang, Benjamin Männel, Pierre Sakic, Maorong Ge & Harald Schuh was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on [10 October 2020] without open access.

A modified multipath error mitigation method using the multi-point hemispherical grid model (MHGM) is proposed, and the influence of changes in the observation environments of IGS stations on their data quality is evaluated. The multipath error models of different satellite pairs for different observation periods can be established using the integrated multi-GNSS data in the proposed method. The test

Point cloud registration is a fundamental problem in 3D computer vision. This paper addresses scan matching for reliable Mobile LiDAR Systems (MLSs) that can traverse different environments and be robust against outliers and noise. High reliability in multiple scenarios is vital to many applications, such as autonomous driving, but poor feature representations often compromise it. This paper introduces

Countrywide winter and summer Sentinel-1 (S1) backscatter data, cloud-free summer Sentinel-2 (S2) images, an Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS)-based Digital Terrain Model (DTM) and a forest mask were used to model and subsequently map Dominant Leaf Type (DLT) with the thematic classes broadleaved and coniferous trees for the whole of Switzerland. A novel workflow was developed that is robust, cost-efficient

Atmospheric noise is one of the primary challenges for improving the accuracy of deformation estimation by InSAR technologies. Temporal filtering methods, like Gaussian filtering, are commonly used to remove the atmospheric noise from the InSAR time series. Such low-pass filters can effectively suppress stochastic noise. Yet, its performance heavily depends on the parameter settings and can easily

We develop a new statistically-robust adaptive regression method (SARM) to extract clear sky true color imagery, approximating the near-surface imagery, derived from multiple satellite daily imagery time series, while avoiding artifacts due to clouds and cloud shadows. We compare the SARM-derived near-surface imagery against simpler approaches for various surface types, and perform a quantitative evaluation

Road markings are of great significance to road inventory management, intelligent transportation systems, high-definition maps (HD Maps), and autonomous driving. Most existing methods focus on extracting and classifying the road markings from mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds. Nevertheless, the performance suffers from the wear and incompleteness of road markings. Converting the extracted road

The Congo Basin (CB) occupies a large part of the Congo Craton, which formed from the amalgamation of different cratonic blocks of Archean age. It records the history of deposition of up to 1 Gyr of sediments, one of the longest geological records on Earth above a crystalline basement. It is considered as a typical intracratonic basin, with its slow and long-lived subsidence history and the largely

The invariants of gravity (or gravitational) gradient tensor can be applied as the additional internal parameters for the gravity gradient tensor, which have been widely used in the recovery of the global gravity field models in geodesy, interpretation of geophysical properties in geophysics, and gravity matching in navigation and positioning. In this contribution, we provide the general formulae of

Identification of flood water extent from satellite images has historically relied on either synthetic aperture radar (SAR) or multi-spectral (MS) imagery. MS sensors are limited to cloud free conditions, whereas SAR imagery is plagued by noise-like speckle. Prior studies that use combinations of MS and SAR data to overcome individual limitations of these sensors have not fully examined sensitivity

Sentinel-3 is a newly launched satellite implemented by the European Space Agency (ESA) for global observation. The Ocean and Land Colour Imager (OLCI) sensor onboard Sentinel-3 provides 21 band images with a fine spectral resolution and is of great value for ocean, land and atmospheric monitoring. The two platforms (Sentinel-3A and -3B) can provide OLCI images at an almost daily temporal resolution

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-manifold feature fusion (MMFF) based deep learning framework for automatic target recognition (ATR) in complex-valued synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The conventional real-valued convolutional neural networks (CNN) usually ignore the intrinsic geometry structure of complex numbers, and the existing complex- and manifold-valued CNNs are not in accordance

We investigated the suitability of the astronomical 15 GHz Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) observing program MOJAVE-5 for estimation of geodetic parameters, such as station coordinates and Earth orientation parameters. We processed a concurrent dedicated VLBA geodesy program observed at 2.3 GHz and 8.6 GHz starting on September 2016 through July 2020 as reference dataset. We showed that the baseline

Existing supervised-learning-based methods have achieved remarkable performance for Airborne LiDAR point cloud classification with the help of large-scale human-annotated datasets. However, human annotations are usually labor-intensive and time-consuming, especially for dense segmentation labels, and an inadequate dataset may lead to poor generalization ability of the learned models. In this paper

With a growing concern over rapid Antarctic ice loss in recent years, the Amundsen Sea, one of the fastest-melting areas in Antarctica, currently becomes a hotspot for the Earth sciences in the context of its linkage to global climate. As a center of strong physical and biological coupling processes, polynyas of the Amundsen Sea could act as sentinels of changes in atmosphere–ice–ocean interactions

Evolutionary processes in ant-plant mutualisms are mediated by intrinsic features of the association and by change through time in abiotic components of the system (e.g. geography and climate). Incorporating both biotic and abiotic components and the phylogenies of the taxa involved is central to understanding their respective roles in mutualism evolution. We used a comparative phylogeographic approach