DSM USA 30 Sept-3 Oct 2008
3rd Global Workshop on Digital Soil Mapping (DSM 2008 USA), “Digital Soil Mapping: Bridging Research, Production, and Environmental Application.” Visit http://dsmusa.org/
This workshop will cover the following topics:
- Evaluating and using legacy data in digital soil mapping.
- Exploring new sampling schemes and environmental covariates in digital soil mapping.
- Using integrated sensors or other new technologies for inferring soil properties or status.
- Innovative inference systems (new methodologies for predicting soil classes and properties, and estimating uncertainties).
- Using digital soil mapping products and their uncertainties for soil assessment and environmental applications.
- Protocol and capacity building for making digital soil mapping operational.
General Information:
The workshop will be held at Utah State University in Logan, a small city located in Cache Valley between the Wellsville Mountains and the Bear River Range of northern Utah. Late September-early October is a stunningly beautiful time of year, with normally sunny and warm days, cool nights, and autumn colors.
There is an optional field trip on Tuesday, September 30, limited to 42 participants.
The three workshop days are 1-3 October. The workshop will consist of sessions that address each of the above topics. Each session will consist of an invited keynote talk (30 minutes) followed by contributed talks (minimum 5 minutes, maximum 10 minutes - the length will depend on the number of contributions.) There will be at least one hour for discussion of each topic, which will be led by a discussant. Each session will be summarized by a rapporteur. The final session will be a discussion to develop a set of key recommendations and future priorities for digital soil mapping.
Progress in Geomathematics
Celebrating Frits Agterberg’s half-century of publication activity in geomathematics, this volume’s 28 timely papers, written by his friends and colleagues, treat a variety of subjects of current interest, many of them also studied by Frits, including: spatial analysis in mineral resource assessment, quantitative stratigraphy, nonlinear multifractal models, compositional data analysis, time series analysis, image analysis, and geostatistics. Professor Agterberg published his first paper as a graduate student in 1958 and has since produced (and continues to publish) a steady stream of research papers on a wide variety of subjects of interest to geomathematical practitioners. Most of the papers included here address methodology and feature practical case studies, so that the book likely has broad appeal to those interested in mathematical geosciences, both to academic researchers seeking a comprehensive overview and also to practitioners of geomathematical approaches in industry.
This book will be available later this year from IAMG
Digital Soil Mapping with Limited Data
This book is the result of the 2nd Global Digital Soil Mapping Workshop held in Rio 4-7 July 2006. This book edited by Alfred Hartemink, Alex McBratney and Lou, focuses on digital soil mapping methodologies and applications for areas where data are limited, and has the following sections (i) introductory papers, (ii) dealing with limited spatial data infrastructures, (iii) methodology development, and (iv) examples of digital soil mapping in various parts of the globe (including USA, Brazil, UK, France, Czech Republic, Honduras, Kenya, Australia). The final chapter summarises priorities for digital soil mapping.
The book is published by Springer and will be available later this year. In the meantime, you can view part of it at: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Soil-Mapping-Limited-Data/dp/1402085915
Pedometrics Meetings
Click on the photo for a bigger picture
2009, August 26-28. Beijing, PRC. Pedometrics 2009.
2007, August 27-30. Tubingen, Germany. Pedometrics 2007. More Photos here: http://homepage.mac.com/bslater/Pedometrics2007/
2005, September 12-14, Naples, Florida, USA. Pedometrics 2005.
2003, September 11-12, Reading, UK. Pedometrics 2003.
2001, September 19-21, Gent, Belgium. Pedometrics 2001.
1999, September 27-29, Sydney, Australia: Pedometrics 1999. Read the proceedings.
1997, August 18-20, Madison (Wisconsin), U.S.A.: Pedometrics 1997.
1992, September 1-3, Wageningen, The Netherlands, Pedometrics-92
Pedometrics Software
(Geo)statistics
| Package | Price | Description |
| Surfer | Medium | Contouring and 3D surface mapping program; runs easily |
| S-Plus | High | S+SpatialStats; object-oriented software package for the analysis of spatial data |
| R | FREE | Open source; based on S language; includes libraries for spatial statistics: geostat, geoR etc. |
| WinGslib | Low | GSLIB for Win, commercial version |
| PG2000 | FREE | Practical geostatistics (book and CD), Geostokos (Ecosse) Limited |
| ILWIS | Low | Land and Water Information System, developed at ITC, academic version only |
| GS+ | High | Geostatistics for the environmental sciences |
| Gstat | FREE | Integrates most of geostatistical operations |
| PCRaster | Low | Raster-based GIS developed at the University of Utrecht |
| Explostat | FREE | Geostatistical application developed by the Explostat |
| VESPER | Low | Automatic Variogram Estimation and Spatial Prediction |
| ISATIS | High | Professional Geostatistical package used in mining geostatistics |
| VARIOWIN | FREE | Spatial Data Analysis in 2D; variogram analysis and modeling |
| BMElib | FREE | Advanced Geostastistic Functions of Temporal GIS and Space/Time Data Assimilation |
General GIS
| Package | Price | Description |
| GRASS GIS | FREE | Most developed Open-source GIS… whole community |
| ArcGIS | High | Most popular GIS with the extensions (*spatial analyst, *geostat etc.) |
| ILWIS | Low | Land and Water Information System, developed at ITC, academic version only |
| PCRaster | FREE/Low | Developed by the Dutch Centre for Geo-ecological Research (ICG), Utrecht |
| IDRISI | Low | One of most popular general GIS packages used in education in training |
Digital Terrain Analysis, Fuzzy logic, image processing, Neural networks etc.
| Package | Price | Description |
| GIS Eco | Low | Grid based land feature analysis and soil/vegetation prognosis software |
| TAPES | FREE | Digital Terrain Analysis (only scripts) |
| FUZME | FREE | Fuzzy k-means classification (unsupervised) |
| VRML models | Low | Soil landscape models portrayed in Virtual Reality Modeling Language |
| NEUROPACK | Low | Neural Networks Package for fitting Pedotransfer Functions |
| PARLES | FREE | Software for chemometrics and multivariate analysis of spectroscopic data |
| GMS-SMS-WMS | Medium | Easy going for environmental and water resource modeling |
Compiled by Tom Hengl
Best Papers in Pedometrics
“Best paper in Pedometrics” is an award presented annually by the Pedometrics Commission of the International Union of Soil Sciences.
Up to 2006, the procedure is as follows:
- A renowned Pedometrician is asked to make a selection of 5 (or 6) papers from a list of journals where Pedometrics-related papers are published,
- The list of nominated papers is published on the Pedometrics web page and in the newsletter of the Working Group “Pedometron”,
- All members of the PM (= those on the mailing list) are asked to vote (rank the 5 papers),
- The votes are collected by the Secretary of the PM,
- The paper receiving the highest rank is awarded as “Best Paper in Pedometrics of the year ….”
Since 2007, members of the IUSS are invited to nominate papers to be considered as Best Paper. The voting procedure is still the same.
These are the awarded papers:
Overview of the awarded and nominated papers, and of who made the selection: 2004 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
2003 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
2002 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
2001 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
2000 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
1999 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
1998 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
1997 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
1996 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
1995 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
1994 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
1993 Awarded paper: Nominated papers:
1992 Awarded paper: |
GeoStats 2008 Dec 1-5, 2008
The Mining Engineering Department of the University of Chile is hosting the Eighth International Geostatistics Congress to be held on 1-5 December 2008, in Santiago, Chile. For more info: http://www.geostats2008.com/joomla/

Pedometrics 2009
We all have seen the great Olympics in Beijing. We invite you to Beijing for Pedometrics 2009. The date is 26-28 August 2009.
More information will be posted here http://2009.pedometrics.org
IFCS Conference 13-18 March 2009
Dear Pedometricians,
I would like to invite you to contribute to a Special Interest Session
on Spatial Classification that I will chair at the 11th Biennial
Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies
(IFCS), which will take place at the University of Technology of
Dresden, Germany, March 13-18, 2009, in combination with the 33rd
annual conference of the German Classification Society - Gesellschaft
für Klassifikation (GfKl). Abstract deadline is November 3, 2008.
The focus of this Special Interest Session will be on applications and
methodological challenges of the classification of spatial data,
especially in, but not limited to, the context of remote sensing and
the
geosciences. Such applications include land cover classification and
change detection, landslide susceptibility modeling, mineral potential
mapping, or habitat analysis. Dealing with spatial autocorrelation in
model fitting and error estimation is one of the challenges
encountered in spatial classification. Specific applications such as
hyperspectral remote sensing result in additional challenges such as
high-dimensional data. Both applied and theoretical scientists with
diverse backgrounds are invited to contribute to this session that is
intended to provide an interdisciplinary discussion forum.
Papers of the conference will be published in a post-conference
proceedings volume in the series ‘Studies in Classification, Data
Analysis and Knowledge Organization’ with Springer-Verlag after having
passed a refereeing process (deadlines are listed below). Long or
advanced versions of papers can be submitted to the journals ‘Advances
in Data Analysis and Classification (ADAC)’ and ‘Journal of
Classification’ that both will publish a Special Issue for IFCS 2009.
I look forward to meeting you at the IFCS,
Alexander Brenning
Department of Geography and Environmental Management
University of Waterloo
Conference website:
http://www.ifcs2009.de/
Important Dates:
- November 03, 2008: deadline for abstracts
- December 17, 2009: notification of acceptance of abstracts
- January 19, 2009: end of early-bird registration
- March 13-18, 2009: conference
- April 6, 2009: deadline for papers for post-conference proceedings
- June 29, 2009: notification of acceptance of papers
- July 20, 2009: camera-ready version of papers







