Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 1410.2707

Applying Geospatial Semantic Array Programming for a Reproducible Set of Bioclimatic Indices in Europe

Abstract

Bioclimate-driven regression analysis is a widely used approach for modelling ecological niches and zonation. Although the bioclimatic complexity of the European continent is high, a particular combination of 12 climatic and topographic covariates was recently found able to reliably reproduce the ecological zoning of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for forest resources assessment at pan-European scale, generating the first fuzzy similarity map of FAO ecozones in Europe. The reproducible procedure followed to derive this collection of bioclimatic indices is now presented. It required an integration of data-transformation modules (D-TM) using geospatial tools such as Geographic Information System (GIS) software, and array-based mathematical implementation such as semantic array programming (SemAP). Base variables, intermediate and final covariates are described and semantically defined by providing the workflow of D-TMs and the mathematical formulation following the SemAP notation. Source layers to derive base variables were extracted by exclusively relying on global-scale public open geodata in order for the same set of bioclimatic covariates to be reproducible in any region worldwide. In particular, two freely available datasets were exploited for temperature and precipitation (WorldClim) and elevation (Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data). The working extent covers the European continent to the Urals with a resolution of 30 arc-second. The proposed set of bioclimatic covariates will be made available as open data in the European Forest Data Centre (EFDAC). The forthcoming complete set of D-TM codelets will enable the 12 covariates to be easily reproduced and expanded through free software.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Giovanni Caudullo. 2014-10-10. Applying Geospatial Semantic Array Programming for a Reproducible Set of Bioclimatic Indices in Europe. https://doi.org/10.1101/009589

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Synthetic Human Mobility Data Generation: A Structured Review of Representations, Methods, and Practical Capabilities

Human mobility data has become an increasingly important component of urban analytics. Although the range of available mobility data sources has expanded substantially, access remains highly constrained by commercial restrictions, privacy concerns, and institutional barriers. Data protection procedures also often reduce the analytical value of released datasets. Synthetic mobility data has emerged as a promising solution, but existing methods differ substantially in their underlying mechanisms, the information they preserve, the outputs they generate, and the analytical questions they can support. Their comparative strengths and trade-offs remain insufficiently understood for urban analytics. This paper presents a structured review of synthetic human mobility data generation from an urban analytics perspective. We review the literature by methodological family and index it by the mobility outputs each family generates natively and the analytical capabilities those outputs enable. We first provide a taxonomy of synthetic data products, including population and persona representations, activity schedules, trip and tour records, trajectories, and aggregate mobility patterns. We then review the major methodological families, spanning mechanistic models, survey-driven population synthesis, activity- and agent-based simulation, deep generative models, transformer-based mobility language models, and LLM-agentic systems. Building on this synthesis, we introduce a Meaning-Population-Autonomy framework that characterises these methods along three dimensions: behavioural meaning, population grounding and scale, and generation autonomy. We consider these dimensions the principal requirements for downstream urban analytics. Few methods deliver behavioural meaning, population grounding and autonomous generation at once, and fewer still with generation constrained to feasible trajectories.

cs.CE

TERRA-NG v1.0: Extreme-Scale, GPU-accelerated Mantle Convection

We present TERRA-NG, a portable, GPU-accelerated, matrix-free mantle-convection code. A single Kokkos C++ implementation runs at scale on NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPU supercomputers. TERRA-NG has a deliberately narrow design: built on a radially extruded mesh of spherical wedges, tailored to the spherical shell geometry, which enables domain-specific optimizations like single quadrature-point integral-evaluations, radial coordinate storage compression and radial shared-memory tiling. The corresponding low-order $W_1$-iso-$W_2/W_1$ wedge-based Stokes--energy discretisation is verified against the Zhong et al.(2008) spherical-shell convection benchmark suite. We showcase TERRA-NG through strong- and weak-scaling on the JUWELS Booster (NVIDIA A100), MareNostrum 5 (NVIDIA H100), LUMI-G (AMD MI250X), Hunter (AMD MI300A APU), and SuperMUC-NG Phase 2 (Intel PVC) supercomputers. Coupled mantle convection simulations at $\sim\!11$ km and $\sim\!5.6$ km radial spacing ($\sim 2.8$ B and $\sim 22$ B DoFs) can be run routinely on standard node partitions of all considered systems. Global $\sim\!1$ km-per-gridpoint mantle convection ($\sim 1.4$ T DoFs) is feasible on an extreme-scale allocation, and a sub-km hero-run at $\sim\!0.7$ km grid spacing scaling up to $\sim 11,000$ GPUs of LUMI-G ($\sim 11$ T DoFs) shows the potential of the code on future, larger machines.

cs.CE

FireDataForge: A Unified Framework for Multi-Source Wildfire Data Retrieval and Integration

Wildfire research, modeling, and education require geospatial data from multiple sources that vary in formats, coordinate systems, spatial resolutions, and temporal cadences. This preprocessing burden limits reproducible reuse. We present FireDataForge, an open-source Python framework that automates retrieval and harmonization of 11 wildfire-related sources spanning fire behavior, weather, land cover, vegetation, elevation, built environment, wildland-urban interface, fire history, and satellite imagery. Given an MTBS Event ID, FireDataForge retrieves relevant datasets, aligns them to a common grid, and outputs analysis-ready NumPy arrays with embedded metadata. Batch processing of historical fires demonstrates support for fire behavior simulation, educational visualization, machine learning, and AI-assisted wildfire analysis.

cs.CE