Modeling geospatial trend changes in vegetation monitoring data

Abstract

In a constantly changing environment, monitoring supports analysis and understanding of many types of change. This paper is concerned specifically with monitoring of vegetation and describes the development and application of a formal model that supports the analysis of spatiotemporal changes in the recorded attributes of a forest/heathland environment. Typically, the monitoring points are not ideally distributed in time or space. The proposed analytical techniques are designed to deal with incomplete data sets and to reveal abnormal changes or transitions. These transitions can potentially be linked to causal events which may have not been otherwise recorded. This work distinguishes five ke..