Small-scale and multi-scale relief mapping

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of recent developments in the fields of small-scale and multiscale relief mapping. Hypsometric tinting, relief shading, continuous color shading, plan oblique relief and other techniques are widely used for maps covering large territories at small scales. The main difference between these techniques and large-scale terrain cartography is that the representations become highly abstract at the observational scale and thus require a high level of generalization. At very small scales, the terrain is stylized to convey distinctive geographic and morphological features. The positional accuracy of valleys and mountain chains becomes less important, and terrain features are depicted as abstracted symbols at the smallest scales. Thus, two main topics are of interest in this chapter: the automation of representation techniques and the generalization of digital elevation models. We focus on both small-scale and multi-scale mapping, which are interrelated because related generalization techniques are specific to the representation techniques. The following sections first discuss general requirements for digital terrain generalization at small scales, then discuss terrain visualization with (a) traditional relief shading and plan oblique relief, (b) continuous color shading and (c) hypsometric tinting.