Search Results (132)

Surveying and register administration are core to land administration, and accordingly, land surveying and registration are essential to socio-economic development due to their potential accuracy and efficiency. Until now, customary land surveying and registration have relied on human input, which is a situation that undermines efficiency and is prone to errors in data handling. During the last decade, the exponential growth in artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), has provided new methodologies that can overcome these deficiencies. This review examines AI in cadastral management by analyzing technical solutions and trends across three areas including data collection, modeling, and common applications. This review aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the current use of AI in cadastral management to the extent of defining a future research avenue. Based on the comprehensive review of literature, this study has reached the following three conclusions. (1) Automated extraction of parcel boundaries has been achieved through deep learning in data collection and processing, removing the bottlenecks of manual interpretation. Models such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers have been used for pixel-level semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images, leading to significant improvements in efficiency and accuracy. (2) Non-spatial data have been processed with natural language processing techniques to automatically extract information and construct relationships, thus overcoming the limitations of paper-based archives and traditional relational databases. (3) Deep learning models have been applied to automatically detect parcel changes and to enable integrated analysis of spatial and non-spatial data, which has supported the transition of cadastral management from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. However, several challenges remain, including differences in multi-temporal data processing, spatial semantic ambiguity, and the lack of large-scale, high-quality annotated data. Future research can focus on improving model generalization, advancing cross-modal data fusion, and providing recommendations for the development of a reliable and practical intelligent cadastral system. Full article

Rapid urbanization in coastal regions presents complex challenges for environmental management and public safety. Accurate, high-resolution wind field monitoring is critical for urban disaster mitigation, infrastructure resilience, and pollutant dispersion analysis in these densely populated areas. However, utilizing massive multi-source satellite remote sensing data for precise prediction remains difficult due to the spatiotemporal heterogeneity caused by the land–sea interface. To address this, this study proposes a novel lightweight Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) framework (DA-DSC-UNet) designed to predict wind fields in coastal urban environments (e.g., Fujian, China). We constructed a dataset by integrating multi-source satellite scatterometer products (including Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT), Fengyun-3E (FY-3E), and Quick Scatterometer (QuickSCAT)) and buoy observations. The framework employs a UNet architecture enhanced with dual attention mechanisms (Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) and Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM)) to adaptively extract features from remote sensing signals, focusing on critical spatial regions like urban coastlines. Additionally, depthwise separable convolutions (DSCs) are introduced to ensure the model is lightweight and efficient for potential deployment in urban monitoring systems. Results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing deep learning models (reducing Mean Absolute Error (MAE) by 14–25.8%) and exhibits exceptional robustness against observational noise. This work demonstrates the potential of deep learning in enhancing the value of remote sensing data for urban resilience, sustainable development (SDG 11), and environmental monitoring in complex coastal zones. Full article

As an important ecological obstacle prone to climatic changes, the Tibetan Plateau has been transformed by retreating glaciers, degrading permafrost, and deteriorating grasslands. Recent ecological remote sensing evaluations typically use medium-resolution and single-source optical imagery, highlight natural factors while ignoring human impacts, and encounter difficulties with time-focused interpretability and continuity within complex terrains. This research proposes a theory combining large language models with satellite embedding to holistically examine the ecology of the Tibetan Plateau between 2000 and 2024. We created an ecological satellite embedding (ESE) model applying self-supervised learning to integrate 12 ecological variables into combined space and time representations as of 2024, according to the Prithvi-Earth Observation (Prithvi-EO) foundational model involving low-rank adaptation (LoRA). GeoChat reasoning was applied to turn the embedded variables into a comprehensive representation feature (CRF). Field research demonstrated strong accuracy for the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR, R² = 0.9923) and aboveground biomass (AGB, R² = 0.8690). Space and temporal analyses demonstrated a general ecology-dependent enhancement accompanied by significant space-based clustering (Moran’s I = 0.50–0.80), hotspots in humid southeastern areas, major upward trends in vegetation indices and productivity metrics (p < 0.05), and higher shifts in transition regions. Despite the marginal degradation risk, the grassland carrying capacity has expanded extensively in the main farming regions. The comprehensible CRF schema identified three management areas: potential risk, enhancement potential, and stable conservation management. This transferable modular approach connects expert reasoning with data-driven modeling, presenting adaptable methods for assessing ecosystems in high-altitude, data-sparse environments, and practical ways to promote ecological management. Full article

The automation of public services represents a key area of development at the national level, with the main goal of facilitating citizens’ access to comprehensive, integrated and high-quality services in the shortest possible time. National strategies emphasize the need to integrate open geospatial data and artificial intelligence into information, transparency and decision-making processes. The evolution of artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), has led to the development of virtual assistants capable of understanding user requirements and providing answers in natural, easy-to-understand language. This paper presents directions for the development and use of large-language-model-based virtual assistants, focusing on their ability to understand and interact with the geospatial domain through an LLM API. Geospatial modeling contributes significantly to the automation of public services, but access to this technology is often limited by technical expertise or dedicated software programs. The development of AI-based virtual assistants removes these barriers, facilitating access, reducing time and ensuring transparency and accuracy of information. The proposed approach is implemented using a commercial large language model API, integrated with domain-specific geospatial functions and authoritative spatial databases. This study highlights practical examples of virtual assistants capable of understanding the geospatial field and contributing to the optimization and automation of public services in the country. In addition, the paper presents comparative analyses, challenges encountered and potential directions for future research. Full article

Illegal dumping poses serious risks to ecosystems and human health, requiring effective and timely monitoring strategies. Advances in uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), photogrammetry, and deep learning (DL) have created new opportunities for detecting and characterizing waste objects over large areas. Within the framework of the EMERITUS Project, an EU Horizon Europe initiative supporting the fight against environmental crimes, this study evaluates the performance of pre-trained prompt-based multimodal (PBM) DL models integrated into ArcGIS Pro for object detection and segmentation. To test such models, UAV surveys were specially conducted at a semi-controlled test site in northern Italy, producing very high-resolution orthoimages and video frames populated with simulated waste objects such as tyres, barrels, and sand piles. Three PBM models (CLIPSeg, GroundingDINO, and TextSAM) were tested under varying hyperparameters and input conditions, including orthophotos at multiple resolutions and frames extracted from UAV-acquired videos. Results show that model performance is highly dependent on object type and imagery resolution. In contrast, within the limited ranges tested, hyperparameter tuning rarely produced significant improvements. The evaluation of the models was performed using low IoU to generalize across different types of detection models and to focus on the ability of detecting object. When evaluating the models with orthoimagery, CLIPSeg achieved the highest accuracy with F1 scores up to 0.88 for tyres, whereas barrels and ambiguous classes consistently underperformed. Video-derived (oblique) frames generally outperformed orthophotos, reflecting a closer match to model training perspectives. Despite the current limitations in performances highlighted by the tests, PBM models demonstrate strong potential for democratizing GeoAI (Geospatial Artificial Intelligence). These tools effectively enable non-expert users to employ zero-shot classification in UAV-based monitoring workflows targeting environmental crime. Full article

The development of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), combining deep learning and remote sensing imagery, is of great interest for automated spatial inference and decision-making support. In this paper, a GeoAI-based efficient object detection framework named RS-YOLO is introduced by adopting the YOLOv11 architecture. The model integrates Dynamic Convolution for adaptive receptive field adjustment, Selective Kernel Attention for multi-path feature aggregation, and the MPDIoU loss function for geometry-aware localization. The proposed approach outperforms in experimental results on the TGRS-HRRSD dataset of 13 scenes from different geospatial scenarios, giving an 89.0% mAP and an 87 F1-score. Beyond algorithmic advancement, RS-YOLO provides a GeoAI-based analytical tool for applications such as urban infrastructure monitoring, land use management, and transportation facility recognition, enabling spatially informed and sustainable decision-making in complex remote sensing environments. Full article

This study proposes a systematic framework for establishing ethical guidelines for GeoAI (Geospatial Artificial Intelligence), which integrates AI with spatial data science, GIS, and remote sensing. While general AI ethics have advanced through the OECD, UNESCO, and the EU AI Act, ethical standards tailored to GeoAI remain underdeveloped. Geospatial information exhibits unique characteristics, spatiality, contextuality, and spatial autocorrelation—and consequently entails distinct risks such as geo-privacy, spatial fairness and bias, data provenance and quality, and misuse prevention related to mapping and surveillance. Following PRISMA 2020, a systematic review of 32 recent international policy documents and peer-reviewed articles was conducted; through content analysis with intercoder reliability verification (Krippendorff’s α ≥ 0.76), GeoAI ethical principles were extracted and normalized. The analysis identified twelve ethical axes—Geo-privacy, Data Provenance and Quality, Spatial Fairness and Bias, Transparency, Accountability and Auditability, Safety (Security and Robustness), Human Oversight and Human-in-the-Loop, Public Benefit and Sustainability, Participation and Stakeholder Engagement, Lifecycle Governance, Misuse Prevention, and Inclusion and Accessibility—each accompanied by an operational guideline. These axes together form a practical framework that integrates universal AI ethics principles with spatially specific risks inherent in GeoAI and specifies actionable assessment points across the GeoAI lifecycle. The framework is intended for direct use as checklists and governance artifacts (e.g., model/data cards) and as procurement and audit criteria in academic, policy, and administrative settings. Full article

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have become essential tools in geomatics engineering for precise positioning, cadastral surveys, topographic mapping, and deformation monitoring. Recent advances integrate GNSS with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), cloud computing, and unmanned aerial systems (UAS), which have greatly improved accuracy, efficiency, and analytical capabilities in managing geospatial big data. In this study, we propose a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network–Long Short Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) architecture for seismic detection using high-rate (5 Hz) GNSS velocity time series. The model is trained on a large synthetic dataset generated by and real high-rate GNSS non-event data. Model performance was evaluated using real event and non-event data through an event-based approach. The results demonstrate that a hybrid deep-learning architecture can provide a reliable framework for seismic detection with high-rate GNSS velocity time series. Full article

Wildfires, which encompass all fires that occur outside urban areas, represent one of the most frequent forms of natural disaster worldwide. This study presents the wildfire occurrence across the territory of Southeastern Europe, covering an area of 800,000 km² (Greece, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Moldova). The research applies geospatial artificial intelligence techniques, based on the integration of machine learning (Random Forest (RF), XGBoost), deep learning (Deep Neural Network (DNN), Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KAN)), remote sensing (Sentinel-2, VIIRS), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). From the geospatial database, 11 natural and anthropogenic criteria were analyzed, along with a wildfire inventory comprising 28,952 historical fire events. The results revealed that areas of very high susceptibility were most prevalent in Greece (10.5%), while the smallest susceptibility percentage was recorded in Slovenia (0.2%). Among the applied models, RF demonstrated the highest predictive performance (AUC = 90.7%), whereas XGBoost, DNN, and KAN achieved AUC values ranging from 86.7% to 90.5%. Through a SHAP analysis, it was determined that the most influential factors were global horizontal irradiation, elevation, and distance from settlements. The obtained results hold international significance for the implementation of preventive wildfire protection measures. Full article

With Transformers achieving outstanding performance on individual remote sensing (RS) tasks, we are now approaching the realization of a unified model that excels across multiple tasks through multi-task learning (MTL). Compared to single-task approaches, MTL methods offer improved generalization, enhanced scalability, and greater practical applicability. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved promising results in RS image understanding, grounding, and ultra-high-resolution (UHR) image reasoning, respectively. Moreover, the unified text-based interface demonstrates significant potential for MTL. Hence, in this work, we present RSCoVLM, a simple yet flexible VLM baseline for RS MTL. Firstly, we create the data curation procedure, including data acquisition, offline processing and integrating, as well as online loading and weighting. This data procedure effectively addresses complex RS data enviroments and generates flexible vision-language conversations. Furthermore, we propose a unified dynamic-resolution strategy to address the diverse image scales inherent in RS imagery. For UHR images, we introduce the Zoom-in Chain mechanism together with its corresponding dataset, LRS-VQA-Zoom. The strategies are flexible and effectively mitigate the computational burdens. Additionally, we significantly enhance the model’s object detection capability and propose a novel evaluation protocol that ensures fair comparison between VLMs and conventional detection models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RSCoVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks, outperforming existing RS VLMs and even rivaling specialized expert models. All the training and evaluating tools, model weights, and datasets have been fully open-sourced to support reproducibility. We expect that this baseline will promote further progress toward general-purpose RS models. Full article

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced geospatial artificial intelligence; however, geospatial knowledge-base question answering (GeoKBQA) remains underdeveloped. Prior systems have relied on handcrafted rules and have omitted the splitting of datasets into training, validation, and test sets, thereby hindering fair evaluation. To address these gaps, we propose a prompt-based multi-agent LLM framework (based on GPT-4o) that translates natural-language questions into executable GeoSPARQL. The architecture comprises an intent analyzer, multi-grained retrievers that ground concepts and properties in the OSM tagging schema and map geospatial relations to the GeoSPARQL/OGC operator inventory, an operator-aware intermediate representation aligned with SPARQL/GeoSPARQL 1.1, and a query generator. Our approach was evaluated on the GeoKBQA test set using 20 few-shot exemplars per agent. It achieved 85.49 EM (GPT-4o) with less supervision than fine-tuned baselines trained on 3574 instances and substantially outperformed a single-agent GPT-4o prompt. Additionally, we evaluated GPT-4o-mini, which achieved 66.74 EM in a multi-agent configuration versus 47.10 EM with a single agent. The observations showed that the multi-agent gain was higher for the larger model. Our results indicate that, beyond scale, the framework’s structure is important; thus, principled agentic decomposition yields a sample-efficient, execution-faithful path beyond template-centric GeoKBQA under a fair, hold-out evaluation protocol. Full article

This article presents a narrative, traditional literature review summarizing current research on the integration of digital technologies in waste management. The study examines how intelligent technologies, including Geographic Information Systems, Big Data analytics, and artificial intelligence, can improve energy efficiency, support sustainable resource use, and enhance the development of low emission and circular waste management systems. The reviewed research shows that the combination of spatial analysis, large-scale data processing, and predictive computational methods enables advanced modeling of waste distribution, the optimization of collection routes, intelligent sorting, and the forecasting of waste generation. Geographic Information Systems support spatial planning, site selection for waste facilities, and environmental assessment. Big Data analytics allows the integration of information from Internet of Things sensors, global positioning systems, municipal databases, and environmental registries, which strengthens evidence-based decision making. Artificial intelligence contributes to automatic classification, predictive scheduling, robotic sorting, and the optimization of recycling and energy recovery processes. The study emphasizes that the integration of these technologies forms a foundation for intelligent waste management systems that reduce emissions, improve operational efficiency, and support sustainable urban development. Full article

The increasing volume of data from IoT sensors has made manual inspection time-consuming and prone to bias, particularly for spatiotemporal air pollution maps. While rule-based methods are adequate for simple datasets or individual maps, they are insufficient for interpreting multi-year time series data with 1 h timestamps, which require both domain-specific expertise and significant time investment. This limitation is especially critical in environmental monitoring, where analyzing long-term spatiotemporal PM_2.5 maps derived from 52 low-cost sensors remains labor-intensive and susceptible to human error. This study investigates the potential of generative artificial intelligence, specifically multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), for interpreting spatiotemporal PM_2.5 maps. Both open-source models (Janus-Pro and LLaVA-1.5) and commercial large language models (GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Pro) were evaluated. The initial results showed a limited performance, highlighting the difficulty of extracting meaningful information directly from raw sensor-derived maps. To address this, a visual context engineering framework was introduced, comprising systematic optimization of colormaps, normalization of intensity ranges, and refinement of map layers and legends to improve clarity and interpretability for AI models. Evaluation using the GEval metric demonstrated that visual context engineering increased interpretation accuracy (defined as the detection of PM_2.5 spatial extrema) by over 32.3% (relative improvement). These findings provide strong evidence that tailored visual preprocessing enables MLLMs to effectively interpret complex environmental time series data, representing a novel approach that bridges data-driven modeling with ecological monitoring and offers a scalable solution for automated, reliable, and reproducible analysis of high-resolution air quality datasets. Full article

As digital transformation intensifies, the governance of spatial data infrastructures is becoming increasingly dependent on the capacity to generate and sustain trust—technological, institutional and civic. This challenge is particularly acute in the Mediterranean region, where disparities in how geospatial data are produced, accessed, and validated are created by uneven digital development and fragmented governance structures. In response to this, this paper introduces an integrated framework combining geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) and blockchain technologies to support transparent, verifiable and spatially explicit models of digital trust. Based on case studies from the Horizon 2020 TRUST project, the framework defines trust through territorial indicators across three dimensions: digital infrastructure, institutional transparency, and civic engagement. The system uses interpretable AI models, such as Random Forests, K-means clustering and convolutional neural networks, to classify regions into trust typologies based on multi-source geospatial data. These outputs are then transformed into semantically structured spatial products and anchored to the Ethereum blockchain via smart contracts and decentralized storage (IPFS), thereby ensuring data integrity, auditability and version control. Experimental results from pilot regions in Italy, Greece, Spain and Israel demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in detecting spatial patterns of trust and producing interoperable, reusable datasets. The findings highlight significant spatial asymmetries in digital trust across the Mediterranean region, suggesting that trust is a measurable territorial condition, not merely a normative ideal. By combining GeoAI with decentralized verification mechanisms, the proposed approach helps to develop accountable, explainable and inclusive spatial data infrastructures, which are essential for democratic digital governance in complex regional environments. Full article

Traditional route optimization frameworks often suffer from “spatial blindness,” addressing the problem through abstract matrices devoid of geographical context. To address this fundamental methodological gap, this study proposes the Iterative Score Propagation Algorithm (ISPA), a transparent, GNN-inspired framework that reframes optimization as a holistic corridor problem. ISPA’s robustness and superiority were tested against established Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods (WLC, TOPSIS, VIKOR) across three diverse engineering scenarios (Rural Highway, Pipeline, Trekking Trail) and two distinct weighting philosophies (Entropy and AHP). The holistic analysis reveals that ISPA achieves the highest final score (0.815) across all six test conditions, demonstrating both the highest overall mean performance (0.629) and the greatest stability (1.000). Furthermore, its flexible cost function successfully modeled unconventional objectives, such as a “climbing reward,” enabling a paradigm shift from cost minimization to experience maximization. ISPA’s superior performance stems from its structural advantage in contextualizing spatial data. This work introduces a new, spatially-aware approach that transforms route planning from a static calculation into a dynamic design and scenario analysis tool for planners and engineers. Full article