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Call for Papers

Special Issue on “Multimedia in Ecology and Environment”
Ecological Informatics Journal (Elsevier)
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/ecological-informatics/

Deadline for submissions: 15th January 2013

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Description
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With the recent progress in digital cameras and sensors, as well as in network bandwidth and information storage
capacities, the production of multimedia data has become an easy task.
This has resulted in a huge amount of multimedia available on the web, in broadcast data streams, or in personal
and professional databases. This explosion of multimedia data has created the urgent need for efficient
organization, browsing and retrieval tools.
It has also generated new possibilities for exploiting multimedia data in diverse and specialized applications that
can significantly gain from the analysis and understanding of such data. Whilst a large number of multimedia analysis
and understanding techniques have been developed specifically for investigating events and behaviors in human-centered
applications, such as sports and surveillance, relatively little attention has been paid to the  understanding of
ecology-related  multimedia content.
On the other hand, ecology is nowadays being considered an interdisciplinary, collaborative and data-intensive science
and as such discovering, integrating and analyzing heterogeneous data are of key importance for researchers to address
complex questions ranging from single particles to animals to the biosphere.
This has led to a proliferation of multimedia data content in the last ten years: for instance, the EcoGrid project has
collected many Terabytes of data (videos, images and audio recordings) for monitoring forest animals as well as fish by
the coral reefs in Taiwan. The wide range of cameras continuously capturing birds nests, wolf, badger, fox and also the
continuous collection of multimedia data for pollution monitoring are yet other important examples.
The automated analysis of such multimedia data poses new challenges, and the results of such analysis are of great interest
to investigators such as biologists in their strive towards monitoring and analyzing the natural environment, promoting its
preservation, and understanding the behavior and interactions of the living organisms (insects, animals, etc.)
that are part of it.

We invite authors to contribute with high quality papers that will stimulate the research community on the most recent
methods for the processing, interpretation, and visualization of multimedia data recorded for monitoring ecological
systems, with  particular attention to animal and plant identification and classification and pollution monitoring.

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Topics of Interest
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Submissions are encouraged, but not limited, to the following topics:

- Ecological Multimedia Content Analysis and Processing
- Ecological Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval
- Computer Vision for Ecological Video/Image Processing
- Animals and Insects Behavior and Event Understanding
- Video and Signal Based Surveillance of Ecological Sites
- Multimedia Processing for Pollution Monitoring
- Multimedia Analysis for Weather Phenomena and Natural Disasters Understanding
- Participatory and Social Environmental Media Analysis
- Multimedia Systems and Middleware for Ecological Data
- Summarization, Browsing and Organization of Ecological Content
- Interfaces, Presentation, Integration and Visualization tools for Ecological Data
- Semantic Web Approaches for Ecological Data Sharing and Representation

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Submission Instructions
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Submissions to the special issue must include new, unpublished, original research. Papers must be original and have
not been published or submitted elsewhere. All papers must be written in English.
Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal submission
system at http://ees.elsevier.com/ecoinf/ according to the submission schedule.  
After login the authors should choose the Special Issue “Multimedia in Ecology and Environment” in the
"Choose Article Type" section.
All submissions will undergo initial screening by the Editors for fit to the theme of the Special Issue and prospects
for successfully negotiating the review process.

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Important Dates
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Submission of papers: 15 January 2013
Acceptance/Revision notification: 15 March 2013
Revised manuscript due: 30 April 2013
Final acceptance notification: 15 June 2013
Final manuscript due: 30 August 2013
Tentative publication: September 2013

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Guest Editors
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Dr. Concetto Spampinato, University of Catania, Italy -- [log in to unmask]
Prof. Benoit Huet, EURECOM, France -- [log in to unmask]
Dr. Vasileios Mezaris, Information Technologies Institute, CERTH, Greece -- [log in to unmask]
Dr. Jacco van Ossenbruggen, CWI, The Netherlands -- [log in to unmask]

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