Fuzziness and Ambiguity in Multi-Scale Analysis of Landscape Morphometry

Recent research on the identification of landscape morphometric units has recognised that those units have a vague spatial extent which may be modelled by fuzzy sets. To date most such have looked at the landscape at a single resolution although scale dependence is one of the reasons the concepts are vague. The fact is that the allocation of landscape elements to morphometric classes is ambiguous, and in this chapter we exploit the ambiguity of multi-resolution classification as the basis of the morphometric classes as fuzzy sets. We explore this idea with respect to both the mountains around

Ben Nevis

in Scotland and the dynamic environment of a coastal dunefield. The results in the first example show that the landscape elements identified correspond to landmarks named in a placename database of the area, although many more peaks are found than are named in the available database. In the second case multi-temporal data on a dynamic coastal dunefield is used to show results for fuzzy set and fuzzy logic analysis to identify patterns of change which contrast with more traditional change analysis. Both examples provide new insights over the types of analysis which are currently available in Geographical Information Systems, and the manipulation of scale to parameterise membership of the fuzzy set is a uniquely geographical method in fuzzy set theory.