Mapping Forest Landscape Patterns

Mapping Forest Landscape Patterns explores the concepts, premises, advancements, and challenges in quantifying natural forest landscape patterns through mapping techniques. After several decades of development and use, these tools can now be examined for their foundations, intentions, scope, advancements, and limitations. When applied to natural forest landscapes, mapping techniques must address concepts such as stochasticity, heterogeneity, scale dependence, non-Euclidean geometry, continuity, non-linearity, and parsimony, as well as be explicit about the intended degree of abstraction and assumptions. These studies focus on quantifying natural (i.e., non-human engineered) forest landscape patterns, because those patterns are not planned, are relatively complex, and pose the greatest challenges in cartography, and landscape representation for further interpretation and analysis.

Preface

Chapter 1: Mapping forest landscapes: overview and a primer
Chapter 2: Fuzzy classification of vegetation for ecosystem mapping
Chapter 3: Portraying wildfires in forest landscapes as discrete complex objects
Chapter 4: Airborne LiDAR applications in forest landscapes
Chapter 5: Regression Tree modeling of spatial pattern and process interactions
Chapter 6: Mapping the abstractions of forest landscape patterns
Chapter 7: Towards automated forest mapping
Epilogue: Toward more efficient and effective applications of forest landscape maps