Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Assessing How Terrain Representations And Scale Affect The Accuracy Of Distance Estimates, Kristian Mueller

Geography ETDs

Terrain is often displayed on maps either as background or foreground. Although terrain representations are ubiquitous, there is not a thorough understanding of map-readers’ cognition of geographic surfaces from various terrain representations. The research described in this thesis empirically assessed map users’ abilities at estimating straight-line distance using maps with two different types of terrain representations and at three different scales. The objective of this research was to assess how accurately map users estimate distance on the ground taking into account variations in elevation. Participant data in the form of demographics and distance estimates were statistically analyzed to determine if …