Spatiotemporal information systems in soil and environmental sciences

This work is concerned with spatiotemporal information systems and their application in soil and environmental sciences. Issues investigated in this work include developments in the space/time modelling of natural variations, composite spatiotemporal mapping, and the incorporation of various sources of information into space/time analysis. Theoretical models, simulation examples, as well as real-world case studies are discussed. The models can process data available in a space/time context, offer valuable physical insight and produce sequential regional maps of natural variables that are considerable improvements over purely temporal or purely spatial analysis. Spatiotemporal characterization involves a multi-scale description of natural processes that reveals the effects of observation and mapping scales. The limited availability of hard data ultimately affects space/time analysis and, hence, the incorporation of soft data into the study of natural processes can be a very useful approach. In this context, it is shown that Bayesian maximum entropy analysis offers significant improvements over traditional minimum mean squared error techniques. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.