Spatial distribution and statistic analysis of the anthropogenic line forms on the different basic fields

Abstract

Despite the rapid development of geoinformation technology and GIS - a classic cartogram is still widely used method for presenting geographic features and phenomena, especially with regard to the relative values connected with the basic fields. The aim of this article was to investigate how the size and shape of the different basic fields influence the results of the phenomenon presentation (in this case anthropogenic line forms). In the experiment were used fields in the shape of: square, hexagon, circle and triangle with different sizes: 1 km, 2 km, 4 km, 8 km and 10 km. Different field areas with the same height, but of a different shape affected to varied quantitative characteristics within them. However, different field heights have caused an obvious increase or decrease the detail of the results. To take a look at the image of the spatial distribution of line forms compared cartograms with another, independent method – kernel density analysis. After setting kernel density image with cartograms one turned out that basic fields shape did not change the image of spatial relations significantly and wellcharacterized them in general. For this study area the best results obtained after the application fields with heights of 2 km and 4 km in the shape of squares and hexagons. It appears that the hexagons better than squares reflect the spatial image of the forms (hexagons allow better representation of the directions and shapes of the studied phenomena), however, they are less common in a geostatistical researches, and that's why they are more difficult to use, especially for comparative analysis.