Lecture Notes & Links Compiled by D G Rossiter Department of Earth Systems Analysis International Institute for Geo-information Science & Earth Observation Enschede, the Netherlands
Research Methods Soil Resource Inventory Soil Geographic Databases Landform modelling	Document preparation Soil Classification Soil Survey Interpretation Land Evaluation Land Degradation	Statistical software (R) ILWIS Spatial Analysis & Geostatistics D G Rossiter's Home Page ITC Home Page

"But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
-- Gibbon; The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire Ch. IV Part 1

Here are some lecture notes, presentations, and technical notes that I've written for teaaching, along with some related links. I hope they're useful, but please read the disclaimer.

Research Methods

Lecture notes

1. Multi-use course materials: Preparation for MSc Thesis Research, last update 09-Dec-2009 (3 volumes, compressed 14.5 Mb)

   Reader for a module on research skills, used in ITC MSc research skills module

   1. Literature review, Citations, and List of references
   2. Critical Reading and Abstracting
   3. Purpose, structure and logic of MSc research
   4. Argumentation and Technical Writing
   5. MSc thesis quality
   6. Use of graphics in the thesis
   7. The scientific method
   8. Statistical inference for research
   9. Ethics & professionalism in science
2. Herramientas para realizar una investigación (186 Kb)

   Versión en Español de algunas partes del anterior, adaptada a condiciones Bolivianas (con Ronaldo Vargas)

Links -- Statistics for research

• The Design of Research Studies : A Statistical Perspective

  An outstanding, thought-provoking explanation by J H Maindonald of the Australian National University (he's also an R guru). Chapter 8, The Rationale of Research, is available separately. (83 Kb)

• Understanding statistics: information and resources to encourage good statistical practice

  From the University of Reading

Links -- Writing

• Publications Handbook and Style Manual of the Soil Science Society of America
• Clarity in Technical Reporting, NASA Technical Report SP-7010

  A classic common-sense approach to writing and presenting for technical workers such as engineers and research scientists.

• Rules of thumb for writing research articles,

  By Tom Hengl and Michael Gould, the result of an ITC writing workshop

• Publishing in Soil Science

  By Alfred E Hartemink (ISRIC). Especially recommended: Part 3: Fraud and Ethics (49 Kb)

• Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals

  From the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Includes rules for listing authors and reporting statistics. This page has links to other important policy items, such as conflict of interest.

• Copyright Information Center (Cornell University)

  Includes guidelines for classroom copying, fair use, and a good discussion of current issues in scholarly communication.

• Guide to Punctuation

  Clear explanation and good examples; from Larry Trask, Univ. of Sussex (England)

Links -- Presenting

• Resources for making scientific presentations

  From the NOAA Seattle Regional Library

  .
• On-line tutorial on making effective presentations,

  from Jeff Radel of Kansas State University (USA).

  .
• Writing and speaking about physics and astronomy

  from John Wilkins at Ohio State University. A complete course with lots of useful links and examples

Links -- Searching Literature

• Evaluating Information Resources Found and Retrieved

  From Suffolk Univ. (UK); part of a series Research Process

Links -- References

• Bartleby's

  includes Columbia Encyclopedia, American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, Quotations, Usage, Oxford, ...

• Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

  Lots of useful information for the advanced learner.

• Definition & measurement of SI units

  from the National Physical Laboratory (UK)

Document preparation

Links

• World Wide Web (W3C) Consortium

  Web authoring standards

• LATEX: from quick and dirty to style and finesse

  by Prof. Tony Roberts, Univ. S Queensland; a good explanation of why LaTeX

• LaTeX project
• AMS-LaTeX, mathematical typesetting with style from the American Mathematical Society
• EmacsWiki
• GNU Emacs
• Aquamacs Emacs (OS X)

Soil Resource Inventory Concepts & Methods

Lecture Notes

1. Lecture Notes: Methodology for Soil Resource Inventories (392 Kb)
2. Metodologías para el levantamiento del recurso suelo (Spanish version of the preceding, translated by Ronald Vargas) (1.1 Mb)
3. Overheads: "Sampling for soil survey" (1.1 Mb)
4. Overheads: Making a soils map from a geopedological map (271 Kb)
5. Exercises: Soil Survey Methodology (32 Kb)

Links

• Soil survey methods

  Links from the Compendium of On-Line Soil Survey Information

Soil Classification

Lecture Notes

1. Introduction to Soil Classification (33 Kb)

Links

• Soil classification systems

  Links from the Compendium of On-Line Soil Survey Information

Soil Survey Interpretations & Land Evaluation

Lecture Notes

1. Presentation: Principles of Land Resources Evaluation (947 Kb)
2. Presentation: New directions in land evaluation for land use planning (1584 Kb)
3. Lecture Notes: "Land Evaluation"

   From a course I gave Cornell University in 1993 and 1994; somewhat outdated but still useful.

4. Annotated bibliography of land evaluation studies
5. Spreadsheet showing how cash flow works (Excel, 32 Kb)

Automated Land Evaluation System ALES

1. ALES Home Page
2. Using ALES on the ITC Network
3. Transferring land evaluation results from ALES to ILWIS
4. ALES User's Manual (1,104 Kb)
5. The Spanish-language manual (somewhat outdated):
   1. Portada (17 Kb)
   2. Breve introducción al ALES (44 Kb)
   3. Guías de Instrucción (404 Kb)
   4. Construcción de Modelos (189 Kb)

Links

• Land evaluation links

  Links from the Compendium of On-Line Soil Survey Information

ILWIS

Technical Notes

• Creating segment maps from a list of points
• Transferring land evaluation results from ALES to ILWIS

Links

• ILWIS Home Page

Land Degradation, Conservation, & Rehabilitation

Presentations

• Introduction to Land Degradation, Conservation, & Rehabilitation (slide show) (2,263 Kb)

Reports

• Report of the Second International Conference on Land Degradation and Desertification Khon Kaen, Thailand January 25--29, 1999 (63 Kb)

Statistical software (R)

Technical notes

• Overheads: Introduction to the R Project for Statistical Computing (1.3 Mb)

  Introductory lecture; includes a list of resources for learning R

• Overheads: Spatial analysis with the R Project for Statistical Computing (1.7 Mb)

  Brief introduction to the sp and gstat packages

• Introduction to the R Project for Statistical Computing for use at ITC , version 3.7 (3.1 Mb)
• Technical notes: R applications relevant to ITC

  Comprehensive data analysis of a multivariate soils dataset, tutorial analysis of the Mercer-Hall wheat yield dataset, co-kriging using gstat, accuracy assesment of thematic maps, analyzing land cover change with logistic regression, optimal partitioning of soil transects, fitting rational functions to time series

• Some simple R tricks

  Download, modify as necessary in a text editor, save to a .R file, and source() them; or you can paste the code directly into the R command line.

  • Setting up a sampling grid, systematic or random (R code, 3 Kb)
  • Directly compute the Ordinary Kriging system, without using a specialised library (e.g. gstat) (R code, 2 Kb)
  • Same, with some informative plots (R code, 6 Kb)

Software tools

• The R Project for Statistical Computing home page
  • CRAN: program, additional packages, documentation …
  • CRAN Task Views: how to accomplish specific tasks with R; including: Analysis of Ecological and Environmental Data; Analysis of Spatial Data; Multivariate analysis; Statistics for the Social Sciences; Bayesian analysis; Robust statistical methods; Graphics; Experimental design; Time-series analysis; Probability distributions ...
• Useful R packages with their own web sites
  • gstat: geostatistical modelling, prediction and simulation
  • RCmdr: A platform-independent basic-statistics GUI
  • sp: Spatial data in R
  • spatstat: Spatial Point Pattern analysis, model-fitting, simulation, tests
• Supporting programs for R
  • Tinn-R (SciViews), a nice editor for R code
• Other useful programs
  • PQRS: calculating probabilities and quantiles associated with a large number of probability distributions
  • GPower 3: statistical power analyses (e.g. to compute required sample sizes)
  • Vesper: Variogram Estimation and Spatial Prediction plus ERror
  • E{Z}-Kriging: interactive exploration of the kriging equations

On-line statistics texts and references

• Electronic Statistics Textbook (StatSoft)
• NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods
• Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics (Wolfram)

Some interesting R links

• Graphics gallery, part of the Addicted to R pages.
• R Labs for Vegetation Ecologists from Montana State (D Roberts)
• R Wiki

Spatial analysis & Geostatistics

Lecture Notes

These all use the R environment for statistical computing; I have written an introduction and several technical notes for this environment.

• ITC Distance education course: Geostatistics and Open-Source Statistical Computing

  These are part of an ITC Distance Education course offered in 2007, 2008, 2009 ...(?); if you want the answers to the end-of-lesson tests, if you want personal guidance, or if you want to do a supervised individual project, you should sign up for the course. The materials are offered here as-is, with no support. Any remarks are welcome!

  1. Overheads (Zip file of 8 PDF, 4.6 Mb)
  2. Exercises using R (Zip file of 10 PDF, 7.6 Mb)
  3. Datasets for exercises
     • Jura dataset (text file)
     • TCP Cameroon dataset (R data set)
  4. R code for exercises (Zip file of 23 R scripts, 36 Kb)
• Overheads: An introduction to statistical analysis (PDF, 834 Kb)
• Overheads: An introduction to sampling theory and practice (PDF, 9560 Kb)

Explanatory spreadsheets

• Ordinary Kriging explained
• Universal Kriging explained
• Co-Kriging explained
• Optimal grid sampling
• One-dimensional simulation

Data sets

• Datasets from JC Davis "Statistics & Data Analysis in Geology"

Software tools

• AI-Geostats

  Central server for all on-line geostatistics resources

• Computer programs for Geostatistics & Interpolation

  Links from the Compendium of On-Line Soil Survey Information

Soil Geographic Data Bases

1. Technical note: Creating geometrically-correct photo-interpretations, photomosaics, and base maps for a project GIS

   "This note is written for those who want to build a GIS of a relatively small project area for purposes of natural resources inventory, monitoring, and management. All such GIS should, if at all possible, include: (1) a base map, often referred to as a topographic map; (2) an airphoto mosaic; (3) thematic maps, i.e. polygon, segment, or point maps from air photo interpretation. (4) a multispectral satellite image and its products such as false-colour composites; All of these must be geo-referenced and geometrically-corrected in a common coordinate system."

   • With figures  (2154 Kb)
   • Without figures  (154 Kb)
   • Versión en Español, traducido por Ronald Vargas  (3.5 Mb)
   • Sample data  (10,476 Kb)
     This has a scanned airphoto, its interpretation overlay, and a scanned topographic map, as well as ILWIS objects to support the exercise: a coordinate system and a DEM.
   • Sample results  (4,375 Kb)
     This has a reasonably good solution to the exericse, as an ILWIS project.
2. Lecture Notes: Soil Geographic Data Bases (203 Kb)

   Somewhat outdated but might be a starting point.

3. Notas de conferencia: Bases De Datos Geográficos de Suelos y el Uso de Programas para su Construcción (713 Kb)

   Spanish version of the preceding; translated, adapted and expanded by Ronald Vargas

4. List of Soil Geographic Databases

   Links from the Compendium of On-Line Soil Survey Information

Links -- Metadata for Digital Geospatial Data

• Metadata Primer (NSGIC)
• Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata (FGDC)
• Software Tools for creation & validation of formal metadata from the USGS, including the MP validator and the TKME editor.
• Metadata in plain language

Landform modelling

• Computer programs for landform modelling

  Links from the Compendium of On-Line Soil Survey Information