October 2021
A busy month ... We have participated in two important conferences this month: (1) The first Agricultural Science Conference in Israel (Ramat Gan) and (2) The International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (Mauritius), where we presented our advancements in vertical green solutions using novel remote sensing techniques.
September 2021
Big congrats to Gabriel!!! who's just got married with his beloved one in a traditional Nigerian wedding.
We are all waiting to your return and to welcome you and your wife here in Israel soon :)
Participating as an Israeli expert for Precision Agriculture in the first virtual UAE-ISRAEL meeting on R&D - met very intersting and inspiring people...
August 2021
We had a nice group trip to Ofer forest where we enjoyed the amazing view and a deliceous barbecue
July 2021
Urban farming is being growingly suggested as the future agricultural solution to cope with food security issues
May-June 2021
Our green wall has been nicely developed, while Yaron is thinking of some creative computer modeling solutions... (quite a straggle, isn't it?)
April 2021
Our second CO2-drought wheat experiment is on its way...
(Picture: Jiang in the glasshouse watching the plants grow...)
We have finally established our indoor vertical green wall system, which will be monitored with many in-situ sensors and proximal sensing means. The hydroponic system will be monitored to assess its effect on the indoor environment, including temperature, humidity, and CO2 concentrations in the room (We will be monitoring human activity in the lab through counting person sensors...)
March 2021
Preparing for the FACE pilot experiment...
February 2021
Finally a real group meeting at our new lab!
We had some pizza and took a group picture together (of course, while keeping social distancing...)
January 2021
Ezra and Ofir (From the Azrieli College of Engineering Jerusalem) ensemble the Free-Air-CO2-Enrichment (FACE) system. We're hoping to conduct our pilot experiment in a couple of months.
December 2020
Welcome!
Yaron Michael has joined our lab as a lab manager. He will assist with computing tasks, modeling efforts, as well as remote sensing analyses (From left to right: Haim, David, Yaron, Jiang, and Gabriel - quite a nice group for a start...)
October 2020
Big congrats to Gabriel!
We've celebrated Gabriel's successful MSc thesis defense (MSc under the supervision of Dr. Ittai Herrmann).
Welcome again, Gabriel, to our lab and to a new adventure towards pursuing a PhD degree...
Jiang prepared a cake for Gabriel (he's definitely getting better as a baker...)
After a laborious campaign and a lot of work, we're finally expecting to harvest the wheat any day now. Excited to find out what was the combined effect of water shortage + elevated CO2 on the yield... (Photos: Gabriel and Jiang measuring in the experimental greenhouse rooms)
September 2020
Gabriel taking care of the wheat plants at the Phytotron. The plants will be moved to the CO2-enriched room soon where we will be assessing their response to both elevated CO2 and water deficit conditions using proximal sensing means.
August 2020
We welcomed Gabriel Mulero (in the middle) who will be joining our Lab soon. Jiang baked a delicious cake for Gabriel. Thank you, Jiang!
Gabriel will be doing his PhD research on the combined effect of soil water and high CO2 levels on wheat yield production and quality.
Welcome Gabriel!
Collecting hyperspectral and thermal data in a tomato field with the Specim IQ and FLIR A655SC cameras
We've started growing wheat at the Phytotron of the Faculty for our CO2-enrichment experiment, which will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. David Bonfil from Gilat Research Center (ARO)
July 2020
Congrats! David's paper from his postdoc at Johns Hopkins University on Climate has contrasting direct and indirect effects on armed conflicts (Helman David*, Benjamin F. Zaitchik, Chris Funk) has been accepted for publication in the excellent journal Environmental Research Letters Thank you, FULBRIGHT Israel ! For letting me have this great experience of conducting my research in the USA |
We've started the drone flight training, with the Israel Drone Organization, at our Lab... We'll be flying our newly acquired Headwall Photonics integrated drone (Hyperspectral + LiDAR) system soon. Exciting! |
Congrats!
To Jiang who has been awarded the Chinese Government Scholarship for excellent students to pursue his PhD degree in Israel.
Well done Jiang! we're proud to have you in our lab
June 2020
Welcome!
Jiang and Haim have joined the lab.
Jiang (left) will be conducting his PhD research on 'Modeling water-crop interactions in the face of climate change'. Haim (right), our new lab assistant, will be working (among other things) on our new satellite-driven RS-PestDyn model, forecasting Pink Bollworm populations in cotton fields.
Welcome aboard!
Congrats!
David's paper from the postdoc at Hopkins has been accepted for publication in Global Environmental Change (IF 10.466):
Helman David* and Benjamin F. Zaitchik (accepted). Temperature anomalies affect violent conflicts in African and Middle Eastern warm regions. Global Environmental Change.
May 2020
David Helman has been nominated as a Member Committee (MC) from Israel in the COST Action CA19139 on 'Process-based models for climate (PROCLIAS)' leaded by Dr Christopher Reyer from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
PROCLIAS aims to develop common protocols, harmonized datasets and a joint understanding of how to conduct cross-sectoral, multi-model climate impact studies at regional and global scales.
PROCLIAS will allow for attribution of impacts of recent climatic changes and robust projections of future climate impacts.
PROCLIAS will focus on key interactions of climate impacts across sectors, their accumulated effect, especially of extreme events, the attribution of impacts to climate change and the quantification of uncertainties.
Very exciting!!!
Already looking foreword to our MC kick-off meeting at the COST headquarters in Brussels...
April 2020
Congratulations!
Amir's paper has been accepted for publication in the excellent journal of Land Degradation & Development (IF 3.775):
Mussery Amir*, Helman David, Agmon Yael, Ben-Shabat Itzik, El-Fregat Salem, Goldman-Golan Deborah (2020). The indigenous Bedouin farmers as land rehabilitators - setup of an action research programme in the Negev. Land Degradation and Development.
Double congrats!
Our first M&M-VS lab's paper was accepted for publication in the highly rated journal of Science of the Total Environment (IF 6.551):
February 2020
Very exciting at the iCROPM 2020 International conference on crop modeling for the future, and nice venue as well (Le Corum Cenference Center, Montpellier, France)...
David Helman was invited to give a seminar talk on "Modeling and Monitoring Plant-Related Processes and Dynamics Using Remote Sensing" at the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI). By the way, a very exciting research is conducted at the GSI. And yeah, David was given a nice, original present from GSI. Thank you!
January 2020
Congratulations! David Helman has accepted the invitation to join Remote Sensing as a Topic Editor
Tamir's paper on large floods along the hyperarid Kuiseb River in Namibia detected from satellites is getting attention in NASA Earth Observatory
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October 2019
Watch the green walls at BIU campus becoming green . . .
August 2019
Congrats ! ! ! the construction of our green walls is on the way . . .
These walls will serve to test the various aspects of potential impacts (e.g. physical and biological feedback, health, economic aspects and urban planning) of growing vegetation on outdoor vertical walls within the urban environment, using high-technology.
The project name: "Green Smart City: using precision agriculture technologies in green high-rise building (HRB) walls" (China-Israel Cooperative Scientific Research Program from the Chinese and Israeli Ministries of Science and Technology)
May 2019
Fulbright Israel Reception on May 30, 2019 at Embassy of Israel, Washington DC. Interesting evening and interesting people...
February 2019
Check out the new ARO website on Kandel Project (Precision Irrigation) and a new irrigation tool for vineyards using Planet 'dove' images (Open source Publication)
"Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a technology that can capture up to 90% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced from the use of fossil fuels..."
January 2019
Our paper on early prediction of wheat grain yield was just published!
December 2018
Congratulations!!! We've just won the funding of the China-Israel Cooperative Scientific Research Program from the Chinese and Israeli Ministries of Science and Technology to pursue our research titled: "Green Smart City: using precision agriculture technologies in green high-rise building (HRB) walls"
A successful AGU fall meeting and big interest in our Crop RS-Met model and its use for early prediction of wheat grain yield in rainfed fields...
November 2018
Preparing for the upcoming AGU fall meeting in Washington, DC...(10-14 December 2018)
Check my iPoster that will be presented in the eLightning session (Wednesday 12, December at 14:28 in eLightning Theater II)
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October 2018
Starting my Fulbright Program at Johns Hopkins University on 'the link between climate, water/agricultural resources, and human violence in Africa and the Middle East'...
With Prof. Ben Zaitchik (right), my host, at the front of Olin Hall, Dept. of Earth & Planetary Sciences (October 29, 2018).
Check our new publication on monitoring water status in vineyards using Planet Dove images (Using Time Series of High-Resolution Planet Satellites Images to Monitor Grapevine Stem Water Potential in Commercial Vineyards).
September 2018
Celebrating Yaron's (standing to the right) new publication in Remote Sensing (Economic Assessment of Fire Damage to Urban Forest in the Wildland-Urban Interface Using Planet Satellites Constellation Images) at Itamar Lensky's (left) Remote Sensing Lab (17th September 2018).
June 2018
With US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman at the Fulbright Annual Dinner (4th June 2018). It was a great pleasure to meet the US Ambassador to Israel in his lovely house...
Some useful links:
To download files in balk using wget (type in Terminal):
wget -r -H -nc -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -A .pdf,.epub -e robots=off -l1 -i 'http://archive.org/download/'
In the above example, only pdf and epub files are downloaded (to the directory from which you call the procedure).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: To craft a wget command for your specific needs you might need to understand the various options. It can get complicated so try to get a thorough understanding before experimenting.You can learn more about unix commands at Basic unix commands
An explanation of each options used in our example wget command are as follows:
-r recursive download; required in order to move from the item identifier down into its individual files
-H enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving (the initial URL for the directory will be on archive.org, and the individual file locations will be on a specific datanode)
-nc no clobber; if a local copy already exists of a file, don’t download it again (useful if you have to restart the wget at some point, as it avoids re-downloading all the files that were already done during the first pass)
-np no parent; ensures that the recursion doesn’t climb back up the directory tree to other items (by, for instance, following the “../” link in the directory listing)
-nH no host directories; when using -r, wget will create a directory tree to stick the local copies in, starting with the hostname ({datanode}.us.archive.org/), unless -nH is provided
--cut-dirs=1 completes what -nH started by skipping the hostname; when saving files on the local disk (from a URL likehttp://{datanode}.us.archive.org/{drive}/items/{identifier}/{identifier}.pdf), skip the /{drive}/items/ portion of the URL, too, so that all {identifier} directories appear together in the current directory, instead of being buried several levels down in multiple {drive}/items/ directories
-e robots=off archive.org datanodes contain robots.txt files telling robotic crawlers not to traverse the directory structure; in order to recurse from the directory to the individual files, we need to tell wget to ignore the robots.txt directive
-i ../itemlist.txt location of input file listing all the URLs to use; “../itemlist” means the list of items should appear one level up in the directory structure, in a file called “itemlist.txt” (you can call the file anything you want, so long as you specify its actual name after -i)
-B 'http://archive.org/download/' base URL; gets prepended to the text read from the -i file (this is what allows us to have just the identifiers in the itemlist file, rather than the full URL on each line)
Additional options that may be needed sometimes:
-l depth --level=depth Specify recursion maximum depth level depth. The default maximum depth is 5. This option is helpful when you are downloading items that contain external links or URL’s in either the items metadata or other text files within the item. Here’s an example command to avoid downloading external links contained in an items metadata:
wget -r -H -nc -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -l 1 -e robots=off -i ../itemlist.txt -B 'http://archive.org/download/'
-A -R accept-list and reject-list, either limiting the download to certain kinds of file, or excluding certain kinds of file; for instance, adding the following options to your wget command would download all files except those whose names end with _orig_jp2.tar or _jpg.pdf:
wget -r -H -nc -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -R _orig_jp2.tar,_jpg.pdf -e robots=off -i ../itemlist.txt -B 'http://archive.org/download/'
And adding the following options would download all files containing zelazny in their names, except those ending with .ps:
wget -r -H -nc -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -A "*zelazny*" -R .ps -e robots=off -i ../itemlist.txt -B 'http://archive.org/download/'
See http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/html_node/Types-of-Files.html for a fuller explanation.
Tips:
Link to AVHRR LAI-FAPAR dataset 1984-2019:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/avhrr-land-leaf-area-index-and-fapar/access/
wget -r -H -nc -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -A .pdf,.epub -e robots=off -l1 -i 'http://archive.org/download/'
In the above example, only pdf and epub files are downloaded (to the directory from which you call the procedure).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: To craft a wget command for your specific needs you might need to understand the various options. It can get complicated so try to get a thorough understanding before experimenting.You can learn more about unix commands at Basic unix commands
An explanation of each options used in our example wget command are as follows:
-r recursive download; required in order to move from the item identifier down into its individual files
-H enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving (the initial URL for the directory will be on archive.org, and the individual file locations will be on a specific datanode)
-nc no clobber; if a local copy already exists of a file, don’t download it again (useful if you have to restart the wget at some point, as it avoids re-downloading all the files that were already done during the first pass)
-np no parent; ensures that the recursion doesn’t climb back up the directory tree to other items (by, for instance, following the “../” link in the directory listing)
-nH no host directories; when using -r, wget will create a directory tree to stick the local copies in, starting with the hostname ({datanode}.us.archive.org/), unless -nH is provided
--cut-dirs=1 completes what -nH started by skipping the hostname; when saving files on the local disk (from a URL likehttp://{datanode}.us.archive.org/{drive}/items/{identifier}/{identifier}.pdf), skip the /{drive}/items/ portion of the URL, too, so that all {identifier} directories appear together in the current directory, instead of being buried several levels down in multiple {drive}/items/ directories
-e robots=off archive.org datanodes contain robots.txt files telling robotic crawlers not to traverse the directory structure; in order to recurse from the directory to the individual files, we need to tell wget to ignore the robots.txt directive
-i ../itemlist.txt location of input file listing all the URLs to use; “../itemlist” means the list of items should appear one level up in the directory structure, in a file called “itemlist.txt” (you can call the file anything you want, so long as you specify its actual name after -i)
-B 'http://archive.org/download/' base URL; gets prepended to the text read from the -i file (this is what allows us to have just the identifiers in the itemlist file, rather than the full URL on each line)
Additional options that may be needed sometimes:
-l depth --level=depth Specify recursion maximum depth level depth. The default maximum depth is 5. This option is helpful when you are downloading items that contain external links or URL’s in either the items metadata or other text files within the item. Here’s an example command to avoid downloading external links contained in an items metadata:
wget -r -H -nc -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -l 1 -e robots=off -i ../itemlist.txt -B 'http://archive.org/download/'
-A -R accept-list and reject-list, either limiting the download to certain kinds of file, or excluding certain kinds of file; for instance, adding the following options to your wget command would download all files except those whose names end with _orig_jp2.tar or _jpg.pdf:
wget -r -H -nc -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -R _orig_jp2.tar,_jpg.pdf -e robots=off -i ../itemlist.txt -B 'http://archive.org/download/'
And adding the following options would download all files containing zelazny in their names, except those ending with .ps:
wget -r -H -nc -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 -A "*zelazny*" -R .ps -e robots=off -i ../itemlist.txt -B 'http://archive.org/download/'
See http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/html_node/Types-of-Files.html for a fuller explanation.
Tips:
- You can terminate the command by pressing “control” and “c” on your keyboard simultaneously while in the terminal window.
- If your command will take a while to complete, make sure your computer is set to never sleep and turn off automatic updates.
- If you think you missed some items (e.g. due to machines being down), you can simply rerun the command after it finishes. The “no clobber” option in the command will prevent already retrieved files from being overwritten, so only missed files will be retrieved.
Link to AVHRR LAI-FAPAR dataset 1984-2019:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/avhrr-land-leaf-area-index-and-fapar/access/