Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are revolutionizing the world in a way their original developers never envisaged. From being military war tools, GNSS satellites are rapidly becoming peace tools that play a potentially critical role in enabling changing environmental phenomenon that do not permit direct measurements to be remotely observed via their all-weather, highly accurate and continuously updatable positional time series. This is evident, for example, in their use in emerging environmental monitoring methods that are considered in this book. These include: GPS-based radio telemetry, which is enhancing ecological and conservation monitoring by more accurately mapping animal movements, their behaviours, and their impact on the environment; GNSS-meteorology, which is contributing to weather and climate change studies; GNSS-remote sensing, which, for example, allows the rapid monitoring of changes in fresh water resources and cryosphere; Geosensor network techniques, which are earning a crucial role in disaster response management; Epidemiology, for improved efficiency in tracking and studying the spread of infectious diseases and climate change effects on vector-borne diseases; and Economics, to provide data for the econometric modelling of casual impact of policies. In Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA), and Sustainability Assessments (SA), GNSS, together with other spaced-based remote sensing techniques, are emerging, not only as modern tools that connect the developers to the community, but also provide information that support Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) methods, which inform decision making and policy formulations. By bringing the two fields of geodesy (the parent of GNSS technology) and environmental studies (potential users of this technology), this bookpresents the concepts of GNSS in a simplified way that can, on the one hand, be understood and utilised by environmentalists, while on the other, outlines its potential applications to environmental monitoring and management for those engaged more with its technology, which hopefully will further energise the already innovative research that is being carried out. Lastly, this book is most relevant to all the professionals whose work is related to the environment such as hydrologists, meteorologists, epidemiologists, economist, and engineers, to name just a few.A comprehensive yet candid and compelling presentation of Global Navigation Satellite Systems and its application to environmental monitoring and a host of other socio-economic activities. This is an essential and new ground breaking reading for all professional practitioners and even academics seeking to study and become involved in using Global Navigation Satellite Systems in diverse fields ranging from environmental monitoring to economic activities such as monitoring weather and climate in order to design crop failure insurance. Nathaniel O. Agola, Professor of Business and Financial Economics, Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Presents the concepts of GPS and its application to Environment in a simplified way Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Silvelyn Zwanzig is Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Uppsala University. She studied Mathematics at the Humboldt-University in Berlin and received her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the Academy of Science of the GDR, in 1984. She completed her habilitation in Mathematics at the University of Hamburg in 1998, where she continued to work as Assistant Professor, and concurrently also in Astrometry. In her habilitation she studied asymptotic properties of the total least squares estimator in nonlinear models. In 2000 she moved to Sweden where she has been working at Uppsala University. Her research interests have moved from theoretical and asymptotic statistics to computer intensive methods. Since 1991, she has taught Statistics to undergraduate and graduate students. Professor Joseph Awange joined Spatial Sciences (School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Australia) in 2006 under a Curtin Research Fellowship and concurrently undertook the prestigious Alexander vonHumboldt (AvH) Fellowship at the Geodetic Institute (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) having been awarded the Australian 2008-2011 Ludwig Leichhardt Memorial Fellowship for experienced researchers. In 2015, he won all the three major Fellowship Awards: Alexander von Humboldt (Germany), Japan Society of Promotion of Science (Japan) and Brazil Frontier of Science (Brazil) to carry out research in those countries. At Curtin University, he is currently a Professor of Environmental Geoinformatics engaged in teaching and research having attracted more than $2.5M worth of research grants. He obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in Surveying from the University of Nairobi (Kenya), and was also awarded a merit scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD), which facilitated his obtaining a second MSc degree and PhD in Geodesy at Stuttgart University (Germany). In 2002-2004, he was awarded the prestigious Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship to pursue postdoctoral research at Kyoto University (Japan). Prof Awange attained International Editorial role in Springer Earth Science Books and has authored more than 20 scholarly books with the prestigious Springer International publishers and more than 200 peer-reviewed high impact journal publications (in e.g., Remote Sensing of Environment, Journal of Climate, Climatic Change, Advances in Water Resources, International Journal of Climatology, and Journal of Hydrology among others). His main research areas that have attracted media coverage (e.g., Environmental Monitor) are in the fields of (i) Environmental Geoinformatics: Satellite Environmental Sensing (e.g., changes in global and regional stored water (surface, underground, ice, and soil moisture) using GRACE/GRACE-FO and TRMM satellites; Climate Change using GNSS and altimetry satellites), which is employed to face the emerging challenges of the 21st century posed by increased extreme hydroclimatic conditions, e.g., severity and frequency of droughts in Australia and Greater Horn of Africa (GHA), and the changing monsoon characteristics in Asia and Africa leading to floods, and (ii) Mathematical Geosciences: Hybrid-symbolic solutions that delivers hybrid symbolic-numeric computations (HSNC), which is a large and growing area at the boundary of mathematics and computer science and currently an active area of research.