Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Error Propagation In Raster Data Integration: Impacts On Landscape Composition And Configuration, Zachary J. Christman, John Rogan

Geography

Integrating raster-based categorical maps from multiple sources necessitates the transformation of geometric characteristics to compare maps, as in land change analyses. By projecting maps to a new geographic reference framework and scaling pixel values to a new size, distortions of map information are introduced that can affect the proportion and arrangement of thematic classes across the landscape. Using a sample land cover dataset depicting a heterogeneous landscape, this paper examines these impacts using three common raster-based transformation methods and introduces a new vector-based method that minimizes error propagation. While relative class area was best preserved by a nearest-neighbor resampling method, …