Evgeny Panidi

The development of methods and techniques for project-based teaching has become an urgent task for the development of education in recent decades, both in general and in narrow domains, in particular, in such areas as geography, cartography, geoinformatics, remote sensing, and unmanned technologies. The paper discovers and discusses some results of the educational and experimental work elaborated by the authors in the framework of organizing and conducting project-based research with secondary school students (grades 8, 9 and 10) during the “Big Challenges” Scientific and Technological project-based educational program (Ecology and Climate Change Studies section) at the Sirius Educational Center in July 2024. The project title was “Development of a samples catalog for satellite imagery interpretation for environmental studies”. Freely distributed software and libraries (QGIS, SAGA GIS, Orfeo ToolBox, GDAL, etc.), publicly available online platforms (GitHub and Zenodo), publicly available satellite imagery data (Meteor, Landsat-8–9, Sentinel-2) were used. A catalog prototype for the satellite imagery interpretation has been created and published online in the form of a website. The catalog incorporated the samples for visual interpretation of a number of objects and situations significant in the meaning of environmental studies and the samples of datasets for automated detection of these objects and situations in satellite images. The catalog contains samples for visual interpretation (fragments of images with textual explanations), samples for automated interpretation (spectral signatures), and samples for automated interpretation by machine learning methods (tiles with markup of the objects of interest).

The paper presents some results of a study conducted in 2015–2023 in an experimental area located in the Upper Oka Basin (Oryol District of the Oryol Region, Russia). Soil losses were studied, which were observed due to water erosion in a stream formed after spring heavy rains and in thalwegs of plowing furrows in an agricultural field with heavily, lightly and medium overplowed gray forest soils. The purpose of the study was to elaborate proposals for the increasing coefficients application to soil runoff estimations produced according to the equations developed by authors. The computational algorithm of the equations is based upon the accounting of in-soil caesium-137 radioactivity, the catchment area and the profile curvature of the topography relief. The equations were elaborated for caesium-137 radioactivity estimation (used as a marker of soil runoff) at plots with soils of varying washout (degradation) degrees. It has been established that increasing coefficients have to be applied to sectors of streams and plowing furrows found on satellite images or during visual inspection. The comparison results of soil loss observed in the stream and in the plowing furrows showed that soil loss in the stream in a sector of heavily overplowed soils exceeds soil loss in the plowing furrows by 1.7–2.0 times. It is proposed to apply the 1.7 increasing coefficient to soil runoff estimations in thalwegs of plowing furrows in areas with heavily overplowed soils with 1°–2° slope. The increasing coefficient for streams in these areas is higher—it reaches 2.0 or more. The increasing coefficient for streams in an area of lightly overplowed soils with 4°–6° slope, is 1.3–1.4. The study relevance is determined by the need to assess a soil loss observed due to water erosion, when ensuring adaptive land use management. It is concluded that the influence of the soil overplowing degree onto the water erosion development requires additional research.

Modeling and presentation of objects’ and phenomena dynamics in geographic space is one of the tasks in cartography. Currently, due to the active society digitalization and scientific and technological progress, many different tools, technologies and opportunities have appeared that can be used for creating maps that would reflect dynamics of processes occurred in the mapped territory. Multimedia cartography and, in particular, animation cartography is relatively new direction in cartography developed based on such new technologies. The animation cartography considers general characteristics, concepts, principles, technological schemes for creating, designing and presenting animated maps. Currently, most of the animated maps require using a variety of specialized software, like geographic information systems (GIS), vector and raster graphic editors, video effects editing software, etc. Consequently, it is important to study functionality of the popular desktop GIS applications in view of the implementation of a full cycle of animated maps preparation, without parallel or subsequent use of any additional software. Within the framework of our study, we have solved a number of tasks, including generalizing the theoretical and methodological foundations and identifying the main types of cartographic animations; analyzing existing methods for cartographic animating of objects; analyzing the functionality of the QGIS application ensuring creation of cartographic animations of objects. As a result of the study, methods and their algorithm implementations have been developed to create cartographic animations of objects in the QGIS environment; descriptions of the developed algorithms in UML (Unified Modeling Language) have been prepared; and the role of the developed methods in the knowledge system of cartography and geoinformatics has been analyzed and determined.

The paper presents the results of studying the soil loss due to water erosion in an agricultural field located on the arable slope of the southern exposure at an experimental area located in the territory of the Oryol district of the Oryol Region (in the upper Oka basin). The research is based on the author’s in situ data. The use of a very high resolution satellite imagery, a digital elevation model (DEM), which was used to calculate morphometric relief indicators (catchment area and profile curvature), a large amount of data of the integrally selected soil samples in a 0–25 cm layer (more than 500), gamma-spectrometric and agrochemical analysis of soil samples together allowed us to develop a system of dependencies for 11 estimated zones. The catchment area and profile curvature were used as predictors. The zones differ in the degree of dissection of the surface by the hollow complex and by the slopes of the surface. For the watershed surface, an estimated zone is proposed that bounds the area of 500 m2 catchment area values. Caesium-137 acts as a marker of the degree of soil runoff. The high variability of caesium-137 in the experimental area is due, among other things, to the presence of pile-collapse furrows on the sloping surface. A gridded map of the soil runoff intensity compiled according to the developed equations shows that the soil loss intensity due to water erosion varies from 5 to 20 t/ha per year. Within 11 estimated zones, there is a difference in the areas of high-intensity soil runoff plots (20 t/ha per year and more). The regional methodology proposed in the article for soil losses assessment using caesium-137 radionuclide and morphometric topography indicators requires verification by an independent method.

In the current paper, we discover a case study of medical service areas zoning automation needed to ensure effective operation of phthisiatric service. The study was conducted for the administrative area of Saint Petersburg city (Russia). Originally, the process of phthisiatric service areas zoning bases upon outdated interpretation of medical maintenance of territories, and assumes splitting of living buildings list compiled for some administrative territory. This leads to appearing of different zoning features (service area geometry and topology, workload imbalance, etc.), which impact the quality and effectiveness of medical service. No unified and(or) open source tools for geographically corrected (in the meaning of accounting of the different spatial factors and variables) medical service areas zoning are available now. Our study is focussed onto closing of this lack basing on geospatial techniques and data management methods. To ensure the automated phthisiological medical service areas zoning we elaborated and tested a set of scripts available to be running in QGIS. Elaborated methodology was documented and considered as a possible for implementation into technological chain of Saint Petersburg phthisiatric service.

To date, basic theoretical and methodological ideas of animated cartography have been formed, as well as general schemes for animated maps compilation. However, the technological issue remains relevant in this domain due to the abundance of modern tools that can be used for compilation of animated maps. Particularly, most of currently implemented cartographic animation methodologies require the use of a variety of specialized software, including geographic information systems (GISs), vector and raster graphical editors, video effects editing software, and others. So the data processing and conversion techniques are extremely complicated in some cased, when data converted from one software platform to another.In our study, we established investigation of popular desktop GISs functionality application as a full-cycle animated cartography environment. In such a context, we discover approaches to improve methodology of animated maps automated compilation. To prototype a full-cycle animation in GIS environment, we developed a set of animation algorithms implemented in QGIS and documented the algorithms using UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams.

In the article, we describe an approach to computational estimation of the settlement field potential, and mapping its spatial distribution in the desktop geographic information system software. The settlement field potential is a quantitative geographical variable that reflects mutual impact of settlements according to the population amount in the settlements and distances between settlements (two or many). This geographical variable can be used as an extra metric in human geography alongside with population density metric. We propose a methodology for automation of the settlement field potential mapping, and propose to estimate the settlement field potential value using distances measured in real transportation network instead of traditionally used straight-line measurement of the distances. To test and verify proposed approach and methodology we produced the maps of settlement field potential for the study area that covers Russia-Kazakhstan transborder area.