Some lines may drive you crazy, but there is an explanation ...
If you’ve spent
much time working with maps, whether you work with 1:24,000 paper quads or
digital data in a GIS, you have probably encountered items that just don’t make
sense. A cartographic enthusiast (nerd?) would call these “mapping artifacts.” One
particularly irksome artifact, common in maps created from satellite imagery,
including LF products, is abrupt linear changes or "lines" often
referred to as "seam lines."
The hard boundary these lines create in ecological data, like vegetation cover
type, are a real burr under the saddle of both the mapper and the map user. In this brief article Kori Blankenship of the TNC-LANDFIRE team explores and
explains some common sources of lines in LF products and how LF scientists work
to minimize them.
