Global Changes and Natural Disaster Management: Geo-information Technologies

Saied Pirasteh is the Director of WIDM.Inc (www.widm.ca) Canada. He is also a Senior Scientist and the Assistant Head of the Mobile Mapping Lab at University of Waterloo. His research skills are in multi-disciplinary in applied geology and remote sensing & GIS applications including structural geology, exploration, and tectonic geomorphology, hydrology, watershed basin analysis, environmental issues and climate change, natural resources, natural hazards, and disaster management. He obtained his Bachelor (1998), Master (2000), and PhD in 2004 from Aligarh Muslim University, India. He has supervised 14 PhD and MSc students internationally. He is also pursuing his second PhD in geography and environmental management (Applied LiDAR and Mobile Laser Scanning Systems) at the University of Waterloo. He is author/co-author of more than 150 publications in refereed journals, conference proceedings and books. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the International Geoinformatics Research and Development Journal (IGRDJ); and the founder of the International Association of Geo-information and Communication Technologies (GeoICT) Ontario, as well as International Conference on Geo-information Technologies for Natural Disaster Management (GiT4NDM). Jonathan Li is professor of geomatics at the Department of Geography and Environmental Management. He holds a Ph.D. degree in geomatics engineering from the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2000. Prior to joining the University of Waterloo in 2007, he was on the faculty at Ryerson University and the University of Regina (2000-2006). Professor Li’s research interests lie mainly in the areas of remote sensing and geographical information science. The focus is placed on use of the state-of-the-art Earth observation and mobile mapping systems to derive spatial and attribute information to support effective urban-suburban planning and environmental management activities; to extract geometric information of urban structures for developing theories and models of urban morphology; to detect land use and land cover changes to study spatiotemporal dynamics and consequences of urbanization as a major form of global changes.

• Part I. Land Use and Land Cover Change.- Examining the Effect of Land Use on the Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Urban Temperature in an Industrial City: A Landsat Imagery Analysis.- The study of Multi-Temporal Analysis of Urban Development and Environmental Changes of the City of Abu Dhabi.- CRF-based Simultaneous Segmentation and Classification of High-Resolution Satellite Images.- The Dynamic of Dike-Pond System in the Pearl River Delta during 1964-2012.- Part II. Agriculture Monitoring.- Effects of irrigation and nitrogen on maize growth and yield components.- A Review of the Effects of Drought on the Grain Yield in the Vays, Mollasani and Salamat Regions of the Khuzestan Province.- Part III. Smart City.- Communicating Disaster Risk Reduction through Web-map Applications.- Mapping sand dune fields in Abu Dhabi Emirate over the period of 1992-2013 using Landsat data.- Spatio–temporal Analysis and Image Registration for Studying Growth of Transportation Infrastructure in Sharjah City, UAE.- Part IV. Climate Change.- Assessment of the potential impacts of sea level rise on the Coastal Plain of Al Batinah, Sultanate of Oman.- Climate Change and Insecurity: An Examination of Gombe State’s Predicament in the North-Eastern Nigeria.- Climate Change and Forced Migration from Ngala and Kala-Balge LGAs, N.E. Borno State, Nigeria.- Part V. Risk Assessment.- Detection of Areas Associated with Flash Floods and Erosion Caused by Rainfall Storm Using Topographic Attributes, Hydrologic Indices, and GIS.- Collapse assessment of substandard concrete structures for seismic loss estimation of the building inventory in the UAE.- Slope Stability Risk Management in Open Pit Mines.- Part VI. Disaster Management.- Status of Spatial Analysis for Urban Emergency Management.- Experimental Study of the Mechanics of Gypsum Seam Hazard for Abu Dhabi.