Publications by authors named "Ross S Purves"

Landscapes are essential to human life: they provide a multitude of material (food, water, pollination) and nonmaterial (beauty, tranquility, recreation) values. Their importance is enshrined in international conventions and treaties, committing signatories to protecting, monitoring, and managing all landscapes. Yet, relatively little is known about how people conceptualize "landscape" and its constituents.

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Events profoundly influence human-environment interactions. Through repetition, some events manifest and amplify collective behavioral traits, which significantly affects landscapes and their use, meaning, and value. However, the majority of research on reaction to events focuses on case studies, based on spatial subsets of data.

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Context: Identifying tranquil areas is important for landscape planning and policy-making. Research demonstrated discrepancies between modelled potential tranquil areas and where people experience tranquillity based on field surveys. Because surveys are resource-intensive, user-generated text data offers potential for extracting where people experience tranquillity.

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Scientific articles often contain relevant geographic information such as where field work was performed or where patients were treated. Most often, this information appears in the full-text article contents as a description in natural language including place names, with no accompanying machine-readable geographic metadata. Automatically extracting this geographic information could help conduct meta-analyses, find geographical research gaps, and retrieve articles using spatial search criteria.

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Human spatial concepts, such as the concept of , are not immediately translatable to the geometric foundations of spatial databases and information systems developed over the past 50 years. These systems typically rest on the concepts of objects and fields, both bound to coordinates, as two general paradigms of geographic representation. The match between notions of place occurring in everyday questions and the data available to answer such questions is unclear and hinders progress in place-based information systems.

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Volunteered geographical information (VGI) and citizen science have become important sources data for much scientific research. In the domain of land cover, crowdsourcing can provide a high temporal resolution data to support different analyses of landscape processes. However, the scientists may have little control over what gets recorded by the crowd, providing a potential source of error and uncertainty.

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The interdisciplinary workshop 'Analysis and Visualization of Moving Objects' was held at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, The Netherlands, from 27 June to 1 July 2011. It brought together international specialists from ecology, computer science and geographical information science actively involved in the exploration, visualization and analysis of moving objects, such as marine reptiles, mammals, birds, storms, ships, cars and pedestrians. The aim was to share expertise, methodologies, data and common questions between different fields, and to work towards making significant advances in movement research.

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Quantification of the spatial needs of individuals and populations is vitally important for management and conservation. Geographic information systems (GIS) have recently become important analytical tools in wildlife biology, improving our ability to understand animal movement patterns, especially when very large data sets are collected. This study aims at combining the field of GIS with primatology to model and analyse space-use patterns of wild orang-utans.

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