THE EFFECT OF SPATIAL-RESOLUTION ON ARCHIVES OF LAND COVER TYPE

It is apparent that the surface types and percentage covers recorded in any land use data archive will be a function of both the scale of the source maps and the resolution of the archive itself. This paper illustrates this fundamental cartographic fact in the context of climate modelling with a simple investigation in which the percentage cover of seven basic land use classes was calculated using national survey maps with a scale of 1:50 000. The results were compared with similar computations using maps of other scales and with the information contained in two recently published global archives of land surface type. The data aggregation problem fundamental to geographical representation enters into the problems identified.