期刊名称：ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
印刷版ISSN：2194-9042
电子版ISSN：2194-9050
出版年度：2006
卷号：XXXVI Part 2
页码：61-66
出版社：Copernicus Publications
摘要：The problem addressed is this: most environmental issues require context to solve them. Is the ocean getting warmer. Is the desert growing. Is the forest declining. Solution: measure the temperature / size / leaf area. But such measurements only have significance if there are other comparable historical measurements to compare them too. This paper is about that word comparable. Can we really compare landscape generalisations gathered at different times and at diff erent spatial scales. Today we have the ability to produce land cover maps at a very high spatial resolution (grid cell sizes of 10, 5 or even 1 m). Historically, data has typically been collected at coarser spatial scales (grid cell sizes of 50, 100 or even 1000 m). To facilitate comparison, modern data is often re-scaled to match the historical data. To evaluate the validity of this process, a series of synthetic landscapes were created. These landscapes included the full range of possible dispersion from a random spatial distribution of scene elements to a highly clustered spatial pattern. Each simulated landscape was firstly classified and then degraded to four levels of generalisation (simulating a range of spatial resolutions). In par allel, the process w as reversed and the simulated landscapes were degraded and then classified. The r esultant classifications were then compared. In all cases the integrity of the data was best preserved when the image w as mor e highly spatially autocorrelated. Changing the spatial scale ( i.e. degrading) of classifications resulted in a rapid decline in information content, particularly in more random landscapes. The implications of these results are then discussed
