Mapping Forest Landscapes: Overview and a Primer

In this chapter, we offer a primer that defines key terminology and that positions forest landscape mapping within a broad context that encompasses all readers of this book. We present the fundamentals of cartography, and emphasize the importance of data representations, map projections, scales, and data collection options and principles. We then formalize the term forest landscape, and clarify how to understand this term in the context of this book by considering the numerous characteristics that could be mapped and the influence of scale on this mapping. Next, we focus on mapping forest landscapes from the perspectives of both regions and boundaries between them by considering the fuzziness of both; we then extend these concepts beyond two dimensions. The chapter concludes with a long discussion of map utility and how maps can be interpreted, mined for information, and how scale affects these types of interpretations. We stress that data with higher spatial resolution is not always better and that multiple-scale and cross-scale analyses may yield more meaningful information than interpreting a landscape at only a single scale. We conclude with a summary and discussion of the assessment of accuracy, error sources, and overall map validation. Throughout, we draw attention to chapters in this book that advance the discussion of the topics introduced in this chapter.