Ecotones are the zones of transition between patches of different ecological character. In landscapes where humans manage the land, they can be sharp or abrupt in space, but in semi-natural environments they more typically occupy space showing an intergrade between one ecological area and another. Semi-natural ecotones are, therefore, poorly treated by the traditional Boolean mapping of vegetation and land cover with sharp spatial boundaries which are implicit in it. Fuzzy sets provide a means by which ecotones can be represented as 2-dimensional spatial objects; fuzzy type 2 sets provide a further dimension to this characterization which is more in keeping with the higher order fuzzy nature of ecotones. This paper presents a methodology for representing ecotones as fuzzy objects with examples of a forest-savanna ecotone from Bolivia.
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© 2007 Springer
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Arnot, C., Fisher, P. (2007). Mapping the Ecotone with Fuzzy Sets. In: Morris, A., Kokhan, S. (eds) Geographic Uncertainty in Environmental Security. NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6438-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6438-8_2
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