This important new work--the first of its kind--focuses on the distribution patterns of landscape elements or ecosystems; the flows of animals, plants, energy, mineral nutrients and water; and the ecological changes in the landscape over time. Includes over 1,200 references from current ecology, geography, forestry, and wildlife biologcy literature.
How do people react to the visual character of their surroundings? What can planners do to improve the aesthetic quality of these surroundings? Too often in environmental design, visual quality--aesthetics--is misunderstood as only a minor concern, dependent on volatile taste and thus undefinable. Yet a substantial body of research indicates the importance of visual quality in the environment to the public and has uncovered systematic patterns of human response to visual attributes of the built environment. Efforts to understand environmental aesthetics have been undertaken by investigators from such diverse fields as landscape architecture, environmental psychology, geography, philosophy, architecture, and city planning. As a result the relevant information is scattered and not readily available to professionals and policy makers. The book brings together classic and new contributions by distinguished workers in different disciplines. It explores theory and data on preferences in the visual environment, and also addresses the practical application of aesthetic criteria in design, planning and public policy. Promising directions for future research are identified.
There are many books on neural networks, some of which cover computational intelligence, but none that incorporate both feature extraction and computational intelligence, as Supervised and Unsupervised Pattern Recognition does. This volume describes the application of a novel, unsupervised pattern recognition scheme to the classification of various types of waveforms and images. This substantial collection of recent research begins with an introduction to Neural Networks, classifiers, and feature extraction methods. It then addresses unsupervised and fuzzy neural networks and their applications to handwritten character recognition and recognition of normal and abnormal visual evoked potentials. The third section deals with advanced neural network architectures-including modular design-and their applications to medicine and three-dimensional NN architecture simulating brain functions. The final section discusses general applications and simulations, such as the establishment of a brain-computer link, speaker identification, and face recognition. In the quickly changing field of computational intelligence, every discovery is significant. Supervised and Unsupervised Pattern Recognition gives you access to many notable findings in one convenient volume.
Few gardens can transport visitors to wild and rugged landscapes as well as rock gardens. Eye-catching rock gardens are among the most challenging—and satisfying—expressions of the gardener's craft. A true rock garden is a specialized habitat that allows the gardener to grow plants that do not flourish anywhere else. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of building rock gardens in all parts of North America. Topics covered include rock placement, materials, and planting and maintenance. Variations on the rock garden theme, from planting troughs to creating water features are also discussed. The book presents regional styles and techniques and profiles a dozen public rock gardens from Oregon to Newfoundland. This book is only available through print on demand. All interior art is black and white.
Providing a fresh approach to the theory of design, Landscape: Pattern, Perception and Process synthesizes planning, design and ecology and shows a new view of where design can develop. The book brings together the work and subject areas of a range of disciplines including psychologists, philosophers, geologists, ecologists, cultural geographers, foresters, urban planners and landscape architects and synthesizes all these together. Since many landscape and environmental problems require multi-disciplinary approaches for their solution, this book demonstrates how the best integration can be achieved. Highly illustrated, it contains examples from North America, Canada, Europe and Australasia. Glossary, references and further reading provide the reader with guidance and back-up resources.
na broad sense Design Science is the grammar of a language of images Irather than of words. Modern communication techniques enable us to transmit and reconstitute images without needing to know a specific verbal sequence language such as the Morse code or Hungarian. International traffic signs use international image symbols which are not specific to any particular verbal language. An image language differs from a verbal one in that the latter uses a linear string of symbols, whereas the former is multi dimensional. Architectural renderings commonly show projections onto three mutual ly perpendicular planes, or consist of cross sections at different altitudes capa ble of being stacked and representing different floor plans. Such renderings make it difficult to imagine buildings comprising ramps and other features which disguise the separation between floors, and consequently limit the cre ative process of the architect. Analogously, we tend to analyze natural struc tures as if nature had used similar stacked renderings, rather than, for instance, a system of packed spheres, with the result that we fail to perceive the system of organization determining the form of such structures. Perception is a complex process. Our senses record; they are analogous to audio or video devices. We cannot, however, claim that such devices perceive.