The Scottish Office Department of Agriculture and Fisheries Department has been concerned to know the area of bracken (Pteridium aquilinum ) in Scotland and how rapidly it is spreading. It offers a potential danger to animal health and a devaluation of land for agricultural practice. Bracken is present in patches which are often difficult to delimit because of variable density and appearance throughout the year and is not consistently identifiable at a single minimum spatial resolution. Bracken provided a candidate vegetation type for prototyping a knowledge-based system (KBS) which synthesized environmental data expressed spatially, with knowledge on vegetation dynamics and vegetation succession in particular. Temporal models of vegetation types, which have different degrees of reliability with analysis of static spatial data were incorporated. The knowledge-based system permits the user access to knowledge about botany, ecology, mapping, image processing and spatial data analysis for an informed and informative answer to their query. Bracken was mapped at three experimental sites using land survey, photogrammetric techniques and satellite image processing to quantify the extent of bracken and bracken change. An existing data model was enhanced by building-in the hierarchy of survey observations and associated error bands. The model was then implemented within an expert system shell with KBS routines written in POP-11 and Fortran. The coupling of the GIS and KBS routines was of the form of: 1. organisation of the transfer of descriptive values as parameters between the data-models of the KBS and the GIS routines and 2. read/write of the spatial data into the data-models for analyses by KBS routines.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:385545 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Creators | Miller, David Robert |
| Publisher | University of Aberdeen |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk/R?func=search-advanced-go&find_code1=WSN&request1=AAIU045243 |
Page generated in 0.007 seconds