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Landslide susceptibility maps provide crucial information that helps local authorities, public institutions, and land-use planners make the correct decisions when they are managing landslide-prone areas. In recent years, machine-learning techniques have become very popular for producing landslide susceptibility maps. This study aims to compare the performance of these machine learning models with the traditional statistical methods used to produce landslide susceptibility maps. The landslide susceptibility for Ardanuc, Turkey was evaluated using three models: logistic regression (LR), support vector machine (SVM), and random forest (RF). Ten parameters that are effective in landslide occurrence are used in this study. The accuracy and prediction capabilities of the models were assessed using both the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under the curve (AUC) methods. According to the AUC method, the success rate of the LR, SVM, and RF models was 83.1%, 93.2%, and 98.3%, respectively. Further, the prediction rates were calculated as 82.9% (LR), 92.8% (SVM), and 97.7% (RF). According to the verification results, RF and SVM models outperformed the traditional LR model in terms of success and prediction rate. The RF model, however, performed better than the SVM model in terms of success and prediction rates. The landslide susceptibility maps produced as a result of this study can guide city planners, local administrators, and public institutions related to disaster management to prevent and reduce landslide hazards.

The Eastern Black Sea Region is regarded as the most prone to landslides in Turkey due to its geological, geographical, and climatic characteristics. Landslides in this region inflict both fatalities and significant economic damage. The main objective of this study was to create landslide susceptibility maps (LSMs) using tree-based ensemble learning algorithms for the Ardeşen and Fındıklı districts of Rize Province, which is the second-most-prone province in terms of landslides within the Eastern Black Sea Region, after Trabzon. In the study, Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), CatBoost, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) were used as tree-based machine learning algorithms. Thus, comparing the prediction performances of these algorithms was established as the second aim of the study. For this purpose, 14 conditioning factors were used to create LMSs. The conditioning factors are: lithology, altitude, land cover, aspect, slope, slope length and steepness factor (LS-factor), plan and profile curvatures, tree cover density, topographic position index, topographic wetness index, distance to drainage, distance to roads, and distance to faults. The total data set, which includes landslide and non-landslide pixels, was split into two parts: training data set (70%) and validation data set (30%). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) method was used to evaluate the prediction performances of the models. The AUC values showed that the CatBoost (AUC = 0.988) had the highest prediction performance, followed by XGBoost (AUC = 0.987), RF (AUC = 0.985), and GBM (ACU = 0.975) algorithms. Although the AUC values of the models were close to each other, the CatBoost performed slightly better than the other models. These results showed that especially CatBoost and XGBoost models can be used to reduce landslide damages in the study area.

The purpose of this study is to identify and characterize individual sources of pollutants such as PM 10 , SO 2 , NO x , and CO in the urban area in Karadeniz (Turkey) using the bivariate polar plots method. In addition, the relationship between the meteorological conditions and the pollutants was determined based on correlation analysis in the region. Bivariate polar plots are a graphical method used to demonstrate the dependence of pollutant concentrations on wind direction measured at stations. Thanks to these graphics, resource types and properties can be determined. Wind flow and pollution data were used to provide information on wind and pollutant interactions in the study area. As a result of the study, it was founded that the main source of pollutants is intensive anthropogenic activities such as urban, street traffic, agricultural activities, and natural resources. It has been concluded that the highway in the region is not an important source of pollutants. In addition, the pollutant relations were examined with meteorological data, and it was discovered that temperature and relative humidity were effective for all pollutants.

The spatial accuracy of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the images they capture play a crucial role in the mapping process. Researchers are exploring solutions that use image-based techniques such as structure from motion (SfM) to produce topographic maps using UAVs while accessing locations with extremely high accuracy and minimal surface measurements. Advancements in technology have enabled real-time kinematic (RTK) to increase positional accuracy to 1–3 times the ground sampling distance (GSD). This paper focuses on post-processing kinematic (PPK) of positional accuracy to achieve a GSD or better. To achieve this, precise satellite orbits, clock information, and UAV global navigation satellite system observation files are utilized to calculate the camera positions with the highest positional accuracy. RTK/PPK analysis is conducted to improve the positional accuracies obtained from different flight patterns and altitudes. Data are collected at altitudes of 80 and 120 meters, resulting in GSD values of 1.87 cm/px and 3.12 cm/px, respectively. The evaluation of ground checkpoints using the proposed PPK methodology with one ground control point demonstrated root mean square error values of 2.3 cm (horizontal, nadiral) and 2.4 cm (vertical, nadiral) at an altitude of 80 m, and 1.4 cm (horizontal, oblique) and 3.2 cm (vertical, terrain-following) at an altitude of 120 m. These results suggest that the proposed methodology can achieve high positional accuracy for UAV image georeferencing. The main contribution of this paper is to evaluate the PPK approach to achieve high positional accuracy with unmanned aerial vehicles and assess the effect of different flight patterns and altitudes on the accuracy of the resulting topographic maps.

Artificial intelligence models, which have begun to be used in every field of science in recent years, have also started to come to the forefront in the classification of avians using bones. This study aimed to identify breeds of domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus L. 1758) using morphometric measurements obtained from the tarsometatarsus bone and machine learning. A total of 328 tarsometatarsus specimens from two different modern domestic fowl breeds were used. A model was developed by performing 10 different morphometric measurements on each tarsometatarsus, and 3280 data points were obtained. Before model development, data cleaning and necessary assessments were carried out, and gaps were identified. In pre-processing and data partitioning, 70% of the data was used for training, and 30% was reserved for testing the developed model. To determine the differences between breeds, evaluations were performed using classical supervised learning algorithms in machine learning. Random forest (RF), support vector machine with radial kernel (SVM-RBF), and the generalized linear model (GLM, logistic regression) were used for model development, while model validation was performed using cross-validation (CV) metrics. After model validation, variable importance, feature selection, correlation analysis, dimensionality reduction, and multicollinearity were performed. The developed model, using morphological measurements obtained from the tarsometatarsus, distinguishes between breeds with high accuracy. The discriminative signal is extremely strong, allowing multiple modeling strategies (tree-based, kernel-based, and linear) to perfectly distinguish between the two breeds. Among the morphometric measurements, Ac (extension of the trochlea metatarsi IV) and Bmit (breadth of the middle trochlea) were found to be the strongest distinguishing features. This developed model combines morphometric data and artificial intelligence to offer an innovative method for scaling, accelerating, or improving applications in science. By expanding the model’s database with measurements obtained from the tarsometatarsus bones of different breeds, it was demonstrated that breed differences can be quickly and accurately determined using a minimal number of measurements from tarsometatarsus bones.

In the contemporary defense industry and the realm of air traffic safety, the identification of aircraft on land and in the air is of paramount importance. Contemporary radar systems have the capacity to track aircraft; however, these systems are inherently dependent on human intervention, thereby introducing a heightened risk of undesirable events. Image processing techniques have emerged as a pivotal component in the detection of aircraft. Specifically, methodologies such as image classification, object detection, and segmentation facilitate the precise detection and tracking of aircraft. However, for direct detection, segmentation models and object detection methods must be employed. In this study, aircraft segmentation and detection were performed using satellite imagery, with the U‐Net segmentation model and the YOLO object detection model being utilized. The dataset comprised a total of 103 satellite images, with each image containing one or more aircraft. Various performance metrics were obtained during the training and testing phases of the models. The highest validation IoU (Intersection over Union) of 61.3% and validation F 1 score of 85.1% were reported from the U‐Net segmentation model, while an F 1 score of 79.8% and a mAP (mean average precision) of 77.7% were obtained from the YOLOv5‐m object detection model.

The diameter at breast height (DBH) is a fundamental index used to characterize trees and establish forest inventories. The conventional method of measuring the DBH involves using steel tape meters, rope, and calipers. Alternatively, this study has shown that it can be calculated automatically using image-based algorithms, thus reducing time and effort while remaining cost-effective. The method consists of three main steps: image acquisition using a fisheye lens, 3D point cloud generation using structure-from-motion (SfM)-based image processing, and improved DBH estimation. The results indicate that this proposed methodology is comparable to traditional urban forest DBH measurements, with a root-mean-square error ranging from 0.7 to 2.4 cm. The proposed approach has been evaluated using real-world data, and it has been determined that the F-score assessment metric achieves a maximum of 0.91 in a university garden comprising 74 trees. The successful automated DBH measurements through SfM combined with fisheye lenses demonstrate the potential to improve urban tree inventories.

Stone Pine (Pinus pinea L.) is currently the pine species with the highest commercial value with edible seeds. In this respect, this study introduces a new methodology for extracting Stone Pine trees from Digital Surface Models (DSMs) generated through an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) mission. We developed a novel enhanced probability map of local maxima that facilitates the computation of the orientation symmetry by means of new probabilistic local minima information. Four test sites are used to evaluate our automated framework within one of the most important Stone Pine forest areas in Antalya, Turkey. A Hand-held Mobile Laser Scanner (HMLS) was utilized to collect the reference point cloud dataset. Our findings confirm that the proposed methodology, which uses a single DSM as an input, secures overall pixel-based and object-based F 1 -scores of 88.3% and 97.7%, respectively. The overall median Euclidean distance revealed between the automatically extracted stem locations and the manually extracted ones is computed to be 36 cm (less than 4 pixels), demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed methodology. Finally, the comparison with the state-of-the-art reveals that the outcomes of the proposed methodology outperform the results of six previous studies in this context.

Mobile LiDAR systems are increasingly utilized for high-precision mapping in dynamic environments, yet the presence of moving objects introduces significant noise and distortions in the resulting point clouds. Addressing this challenge, this study proposes a novel and efficient method for detecting and removing moving objects from mobile LiDAR point clouds. The approach involves an initial separation of ground and non-ground points using the Cloth Simulation Filtering (CSF) algorithm, followed by density-based clustering (DBSCAN) of non-ground points. By analyzing the temporal distribution of LiDAR points (gpstime) within each cluster relative to ground points, clusters are classified as either static or dynamic. Dynamic clusters, corresponding to moving objects, are then excluded from the dataset, yielding a refined point cloud that better represents the static environment. The method is implemented in R using various open-source libraries and validated on high-traffic urban datasets acquired with the Riegl VMX-450 mobile LiDAR system. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline effectively detects and removes dynamic objects, thereby improving the accuracy and reliability of LiDAR-based mapping in complex, real-world scenarios.