ECOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC MAPPING OF LAND RESOURCES

To solve urgent problems of information support for business entities, authorities, regulatory and supervisory bodies, to assess the ecological and economic situation of territories, thematic cartographic works are developed, created, studied and used. Thematic mapping aims to identify the patterns of spatial distribution of thematic features of objects and use them in the preparation of maps, schematic maps. To create thematic environmental and economic maps for various natural resources, in particular for land, indicators are selected from various sources, calculated indicators, indicators are formed (based on the developed formulas, scores, coefficients). The compiled maps have a theoretical or practical purpose of their use, purpose. As a result of the study, ecological and economic maps of the Ural and Siberian districts were compiled for land resources. These maps are intended for the analysis and assessment of the use of natural resources by authorities, supervisory authorities, and the public. In addition, further research will be based on them; methods and techniques for their development will be improved. The scientific and practical significance of ecological-economic maps determine the need for their creation to solve the problems of rational nature management, improve the quality of the natural environment, forecast the further development of the territory, etc.

Monograph – <i>The COVID-19 pandemic in Spain</i>

The Department of Thematic Mapping and National Atlas at the National Geographic Institute of Spain (IGN) has published a monograph on the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The time studied is limited to the first half of 2020 which is the period for which official data are now available. However, for the first time, provisional –non definitive– data have been used. This publication begins with an overview of the impact of this crisis on the world in general and on the European Union in particular. It then focuses on the effects that the pandemic has had on demography and on the National Health Service in Spain. It ends with the consequences that the pandemic has had on the Spanish economy, society and environment. This work has been carried out together with an ad-hoc scientific network. It is the first publication of the Department that has been written both in Spanish and in English with the aim of providing the rest of the world with a geographic-cartographic vision on what has happened in Spain within the frame of the European Union during the first semester of 2020.

Extending the cartographic capabilities of desktop GIS – Implementing less common statistical mapping methods as web services together with students

For various reasons statistical mapping is receiving increased interest within the technological shift towards service-oriented web cartography. At the same time new teaching approaches are required at universities which combine both, the motivating of students to get a grip on active programming while learning also about less common thematic mapping methods. The paper points to those cartographic representation methods of visualizing areal distributions of quantitative area characteristics which are often overlooked either due to not being readily available in GIS software or because they are simply not known. Of the nine methods discussed in regard to their abilities and limitations, five are not readily implemented or supported by the ArcGIS Pro software. Within the new teaching course on web processing services (WPS) as part of the International Geomatics master programme at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, the students learn how to conceptualize, program and publish a WPS by gaining a solution for those less common methods. The alternate band map method serves as teaching example, but students are asked to independently work on other methods, too. The WPS course acts here as an eye-opener for the students to the wider pool of cartographic visualization options, of how to get around the limitations of GIS software, and of how to automate processes including making them available to others. With that we hope to contribute to automatically rendered thematic maps becoming more versatile again.

Satellite-based analysis of classification algorithms applied to the riparian zone of the Malaya Kokshaga river

The paper comparatively analyses the accuracy of land cover classification in the riparian zone of the Malaya Kokshaga river in the Mari El Republic of Russia using Sentinel-2A satellite images with the algorithms of supervised classification: Maximum Likelihood (ML), Decision Tree (DT) and Neural Net (NN) in the ENVI-5.2 software package. Six main classes of land cover were identified based on field studies: coniferous, mixed (deciduous), shrublands, herbaceous, and water. The assessment of the area and the structure of land cover showed that forest covers 76% of the entire territory of the riparian area of the Malaya Kokshaga river. The analysis of the results of thematic mapping shows that the overall classification accuracy obtained by the ML algorithm is 96.09%, by NN - 94.51%, and by DT - 86.54%. The producer’s accuracy and user’s accuracy for most classes have the maximum value when the ML algorithm is used. For the NN algorithm, the maximum value of producer’s accuracy is observed for the mixed (deciduous) class, while for the DT algorithm – for the coniferous. When classified using all three algorithms the water and bare land classes were mixed, which requires more detailed work when estimating riparian forest ecosystems.

Cartographies on COVID-19 and functional divisions of the territory: an analysis on the evolution of the pandemic based on Basic Health Areas (BHA) in Castile and Leon (Spain)

In the face of the confusion and uncertainty that COVID-19 has caused over the last year, Geography has proven to be a useful aid in the interpretation of the spatial dynamics that explain the transmission of the virus. Applied cartography and GIS analysis of epidemiological data have been consolidated as essential tools for interpreting the health crisis. This paper explores the usefulness of maps for the study of the evolution of the pandemic in Castile and Leon, one of the Spanish regions with the highest levels of infection and mortality. Based on the statistical variables of sick and dead people at the scale of the Basic Health Area (BHA), a first analytical approach is carried out by means of a sequence of dynamic maps during the first wave. Afterwards, a systematic study is carried out using thematic mapping for the period of the three waves, a period between March 2020 and March 2021. The analysis unravels the differential impact of the disease between rural and urban areas and reveals the problems of the mismatch between the functional divisions of the territory (BHA, as units of health analysis) and the scale of administrative management (municipalities, as the effective scale of action).

Dataset compilation by GRASS GIS for thematic mapping of Antarctica: Topographic surface, ice thickness, subglacial bed elevation and sediment thickness

This paper presents the GRASS GIS-based thematic mapping of Antarctica using scripting approach and associated datasets on topography and geophysics. The state-of-the art in cartographic development points at two important aspects. The first one comprises shell scripting promoted repeatability of the GIS technique, increased automatization in cartographic workflow, and compatibility of GRASS with Python, PROJ and GDAL libraries which enables advanced geospatial data processing: converting formats, re-projecting and spatial analysis. The second aspect is that data visualization greatly influences geologic research through improving the interpretation between the Antarctic glaciation and surface. This includes the machine learning algorithms of image classification enabling to distinguish between glacier and non-glacier surfaces through automatically partitioning data and analysis of various types of surfaces. Presented detailed maps of Antarctic include visualized datasets from the ETOPO1, GlobSed, EGM96 and Bedmap2 projects. The grids include bed and surface elevation, ETOPO1-based bathymetry and topography, bed, ice and sediment thickness, grounded bed uncertainty, subglacial bed elevation, geoid undulations, ice mask grounded and shelves. Data show the distribution of the present-day glacier, geophysical fields and topographic landforms for analysis of processes and correlations between the geophysical and geological phenomena. Advances in scripting cartography are significant contributions to the geological and glaciological research. Processing high-resolution datasets of Southern Ocean retrieved by remote sensing methods present new steps in automatization of the digital mapping, as presented in this research, and promotes comprehensive monitoring of geological, permafrost and glacial processes in Antarctica. All maps have been plotted using GRASS GIS version 7.8. with technical details of scripts described and interpreted.