Assessment of land use and land cover changes during the last 50 years in oases and surrounding rangelands of Xinjiang, NW China

An analysis of historical Corona images, Landsat images, recent radar and Google Earth® images was conducted to determine land use and land cover changes of oases settlements and surrounding rangelands at the fringe of the Altay Mountains from 1964 to 2008. For the Landsat datasets supervised classification methods were used to test the suitability of the Maximum Likelihood Classifier with subsequent smoothing and the Sequential Maximum A Posteriori Classifier (SMAPC). The results show a trend typical for the steppe and desert regions of northern China. From 1964 to 2008 farmland strongly increased (+ 61%), while the area of grassland and forest in the floodplains decreased (- 43%). The urban areas increased threefold and 400 ha of former agricultural land were abandoned. Farmland apparently affected by soil salinity decreased in size from 1990 (1180 ha) to 2008 (630 ha). The vegetated areas of the surrounding rangelands decreased, mainly as a result of overgrazing and drought events.The SMAPC with subsequent post processing revealed the highest classification accuracy. However, the specific landscape characteristics of mountain oasis systems required labour intensive post processing. Further research is needed to test the use of ancillary information for an automated classification of the examined landscape features.

Accuracy of outcome anticipation, but not gaze behavior, differs against left- and right-handed penalties in team-handball goalkeeping

Low perceptual familiarity with relatively rarer left-handed as opposed to more common right-handed individuals may result in athletes' poorer ability to anticipate the former's action intentions. Part of such left-right asymmetry in visual anticipation could be due to an inefficient gaze strategy during confrontation with left-handed individuals. To exemplify, observers may not mirror their gaze when viewing left- vs. right-handed actions but preferentially fixate on an opponent's right body side, irrespective of an opponent's handedness, owing to the predominant exposure to right-handed actions. So far empirical verification of such assumption, however, is lacking. Here we report on an experiment where team-handball goalkeepers' and non-goalkeepers' gaze behavior was recorded while they predicted throw direction of left- and right-handed 7-m penalties shown as videos on a computer monitor. As expected, goalkeepers were considerably more accurate than non-goalkeepers and prediction was better against right- than left-handed penalties. However, there was no indication of differences in gaze measures (i.e., number of fixations, overall and final fixation duration, time-course of horizontal or vertical fixation deviation) as a function of skill group or the penalty-takers' handedness. Findings suggest that inferior anticipation of left-handed compared to right-handed individuals' action intentions may not be associated with misalignment in gaze behavior. Rather, albeit looking similarly, accuracy differences could be due to observers' differential ability of picking up and interpreting the visual information provided by left- vs. right-handed movements.