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The Baranja Hill study area, located in eastern Croatia, has been mapped extensively over the years and several GIS layers are available at various scales. Its main geomorphic features include hill summits and shoulders, eroded slopes of small valleys, valley bottoms, a large abandoned river channel, and river terraces. All raster images are prepared in the ArcInfo ASCI grid format. The vector maps are prepared as shape files. In addition to the GIS layers, you might also need to use the field observations. Courtesy of the Croatian State Geodetic Department.

Fig: preview of the main GIS layers

• Topomap 1:5K

• 25m DEM

• Geoforms

• Landcover

• Orthophoto

• Landsat

• Contours

• 25m SRTM

This data set has been used extensively in the Geomorphometry book:

Hengl, T., Reuter, H.I. (eds) 2008.Geomorphometry: Concepts, Software, Applications. Developments in Soil Science, vol. 33, Elsevier, 772 pp. ISBN: 978-0-12-374345-9

Available layers:

- DEM25m - 25 m resolution DEM derived from the 1:5K contours (ArcInfo ASCI grid format);
- contours.shp - Contour lines digitized from the 1:50K topo maps (ESRI Shapefile);
- contours5K.shp - Contour lines digitized from the 1:5K topo maps (ESRI Shapefile);
- wstreams.shp - Streams and water bodies digitized from the 1:50K topo maps (ESRI Shapefile);
- elevations.shp - very precise elevation measurements from 1:5K land survey (ESRI Shapefile);
- DEM25srtm.asc - 25 m resolution DEM from SRTM 2000 project ordered via http://eoweb.dlr.de (ArcInfo ASCI grid format);
- orthophoto.tif - 5 m resolution ortophoto (ArcInfo ASCI grid format);
- topo5K.tif - Topo map 1:5000 (geotif, 23 MB);
- satimage.lan - 25 m resolution Landsat 7 image from September 1999 (ERDAS .lan format);
- landcover.shp - Land cover map digitized from the ortophoto (ESRI Shapefile);
- geoform.shp - Map of the geoforms using the geopedological approach (ESRI Shapefile);Grid definition:

ncols: 147
nrows: 149
xllcorner: 6551884
yllcorner: 5070562
cellsize: 25 mproj4:+proj=tmerc +lat_0=0 +lon_0=18 +k=0.9999 +x_0=6500000 +y_0=0 +ellps=bessel +towgs84=550.499,164.116,475.142,5.80967,2.07902,-11.62386,0.99999445824 +units=mLineage:

50K and 5K scale topomaps and aerial photo have been obtained from the Croatian State Geodetic Department (http://www.dgu.hr). Orthorectified photo was produced following the methodology explained in Rossiter & Hengl (2002). From the orthophoto we digitized on-screen land cover polygon map using the following classes: agricultural fields, fish ponds, natural forest, pasture and grassland, and urban areas. From the stereo-pairs we interpreted the generic landforms and then created a polygon map of geoforms (see also Rossiter & Hengl (2002)). Nine landform elements were recognised: summit, hill shoulder, escarpment, colluvium, hillslope, valley bottom, glacis (sloping), high terrace (tread) and low terrace (tread). From topomaps, we extracted contours and streams and water bodies. In the case of 1:50K the equidistance was 20 m in hilland and 5 m in plain, and for the 1:5K the equidistance was 5 m in hilland and 1 m in plain. From the 1:5K contours and geodetic points, the 5 m DEM has been derived using the ANUDEM (topogrid) procedure in ArcInfo and then resampled to the 25 m gird. The 30 m SRTM DEM (15’x15’ block) was ordered from the German Aerospace Agency (http://eoweb.dlr.de), then resampled to the 25 grid so it can be compared with the DEM25m. IMPORTANT NOTE: According to a licence agreement, the SRTM dataset can not be distributed or used for commercial purposes outside this project.

Data owner: Croatian State Geodetic Department
Reference: Technical note: Creating geometrically-correct photo-interpretations, photomosaics, and base maps for a project GIS (PDF)

Location: Baranja hill, Popovac, Croatia
45° 48’ 16.4412” N, 18° 39’ 54.198” E See map: Google Maps

Attachment:

baranjahill.R

BaranjaHill.zip

BaranjaHill_photo.zip

BaranjaHill_topo5k.zip

On behalf of the organisers we would like to extend a warm welcome to all participants of Geomorphometry 2009 in Zurich. The Geomorphometry 2009 conference continues a series initiated by the Terrain Analysis and Digital Terrain Modelling conference hosted by Nanjing Normal University in November 2006.

Geomorphometry 2009 brings together researchers to present and discuss developments in the field of quantitative modelling and analysis of elevation data. Geomorphometry is the science of quantitative land-surface analysis and description at diverse spatial scales. It draws upon mathematical, statistical and image-processing techniques and interfaces with many disciplines including hydrology, geology, computational geometry, geomorphology, remote sensing, geographic information science and geography.

For the conference, a total of 53 extended abstracts, with authors from 21 countries were submitted for review by the programme committee. Of these, a total of 37 were accepted for presentation at the conference. We believe that the conference programme offers a rich and varied insight into the key themes in geomorphometry today, with a mix of leading researchers in the field presenting methodological advances and young researchers presenting high quality reviewed work to an international audience.

The conference also hosts three keynote speakers. We are delighted that Professor David Mark, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Dr Jo Wood, Reader in GIScience at the Department for Information Science at City University, London will both give presentations on how they have seen development progressing in Geomorphometry during their extensive experience of the field. Furthermore, Stephan Landtwing of BSF Swissphoto, a key producer of LIDAR and other remotely sensed data in Switzerland, will give an industrial keynote – an excellent opportunity for the conference attendees to interface with data producers and better understand issues related to key data sources in geomorphometry.

The conference also hosted two workshops with very different themes, entitled Automated analysis of elevation data in R+ILWIS/SAGA and Back to reality – Reconciling geomorphometry and geomorphology in the field respectively, providing attendees with the opportunity to get their hands dirty figuratively at the computer screen, and literally in the field!

Finally, we would like to thank all of those who make events such as this a success. Our programme committee, who on time and carefully reviewed a large number of papers, our keynote speakers, the workshop organisers, and all those who helped in the local organisation, especially Dagmar Brandova who dealt with registration, as well as the University of Zurich for providing the conference facilities. Finally, and most importantly, we would like to thank the conference participants – without your work and participation there would be no conference. We hope your stay in Zurich will be an enjoyable and stimulating one.

Ross Purves, Stephan Gruber, Tomislav Hengl and Ralph Straumann August 15th, 2009

Attachment: foreword

The creator of the Terrain Analysis System (TAS) has decided to migrate his package to open source. The new version of the software, now called “Whitebox Geospatial Analysis Tools” is available for download from the department homepages.

Prof. John Lindsay is currently looking for potential graduate students (Masters) to join his research programme at the University of Guelph. Interested individuals are encouraged to contact him.

Map of events

The lecture theatre during Geomorphometry 2009 is Y35F32 where Y stands for Irchel campus, 35 is the building number, F is the floor and 32 is the room number.**
Download the campus map as PDF.**

Other useful links:

[ZVV] (Zurich public transport association): Timetable, information about tickets and fares, leisure and tourist information; [SBB] (Swiss Federal Railways): Timetable, information about tickets and fares. Both the ZVV and the SBB timetables combine information about the schedules of trains, trams, busses, ships.; [Website of Zurich Tourism]: Accomodation, tours and excursions, restaurants, events etc. [Zurich Airport]: Flight, transfer and general travel information; [Zurich webcams]; [Switzerland Tourism]; [MeteoSwiss]; [Webmaps]; [Webmap of Zurich Tourism]

Hotels Conorado and Sternen-Oerlikon offer special rates for university-related stays!

For all logistics issues, please feel free to contact the logistics chief: Ralph Straumann.

Attachment: Geomorphometry2009.zip

Perhaps some of presentations could be of interest to geomorphometrists?

Lucian Drãgut, Ulrich Walz and Thomas Blaschke have organized the 6th Symposium- The third and fourth dimensions of landscapes- within the European Conference IALE2009. The contents of presentations in the symposium, as well as introduction and concluding remarks are available below:

1. Introduction

2. Höchstetter & Walz- 3D-metrics in landscape ecology – Methods and examples of use

3. Laszczak & Kozak- Assessment of structural connectivity of a forested landscape in Poland using graph theory approach

4. Victorov- Landscape metrics selection based on the mathematical models of landscape patterns

5. Wickham & Riiters- A critique of patch-based landscape indicators for detection of temporal change in fragmentation

6. Van Eetvelde & Käyhkö- The applicability of quantitative techniques for assessing spatio-temporal patterns of landscape changes

7. Werbrouck, Van Eetvelde, Antrop & De Maeyer- Integrating historical maps and LiDAR elevation data for landscape reconstruction

8. Marceau- Scale issues in Landscape Ecology research: A synthesis

9. Scolozzi & Geneletti- A method to assess landscape functional connectivity at local scale for target species

10. Díaz-Varela, Álvarez-Álvarez & Marey-Pérez- Influence of landscape pattern on scale divergence in categorical maps

11. Völker & Büker- Automatic remote sensing methods for the monitoring of agricultural landscape lements in the context of IACS and cross compliance. Poster.

12. Stupariu, Patru-Stupariu & Cuculici- Geometric techniques in quantifying landscape irregularities. Poster.

13. Nedkov & Gikov- Modeling landscape heterogeneity in mountain areas: a case study from Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria. Poster.

14. Concluding remarks