Virtuality and Reality of Landscape: Theoretical and Methodological Problems in Their Capture and Representation

Abstract

The topic is approached both in a fundamental and an interdisciplinary way. Landscape ecology is the starting point. Landscape is both a construct of different disciplines, i.e., a “head birth”, as well as reality. Depending upon the way of thinking and the point of view of a discipline, this results in problems for the theoreticians of landscape ecology, the methodologists of landscape ecology and cartography, and for the practitioners (“technicians” or geomaticians) of cartography and visualization. The use of map representations and visualizations depends upon which “object landscape” is worked with in a cartographic project (or in a visualization process). This paper aims to offer guidance by weighting and systematizing terms.