Extracting Knowledge From Legacy Maps To Delineate Eco-Geographical Regions

Legacy ecoregion maps contain knowledge on relationships between eco-region units and their environmental factors. This study proposes a method to extract knowledge from legacy area-class maps to formulate a set of fuzzy membership functions useful for regionalization. We develop a buffer zone approach to reduce the uncertainty of boundaries between eco-region units on area-class maps. We generate buffer zones with a Euclidean distance perpendicular to the boundaries, then the original eco-region units without buffer zones serve as the basic units to generate the probability density functions (PDF) of environmental variables. Then, we transform the PDFs to fuzzy membership functions for class-zones on the map. We demonstrate the proposed method with a climatic zone map of China. The results showed that the buffer zone approach effectively reduced the uncertainties of boundaries. A buffer distance of 10-15 km was recommended in this study. The climatic zone map generated based on the extracted fuzzy membership functions showed a higher spatial stratification heterogeneity (compared to the original map). Based on the fuzzy membership functions with climate data of 1961-2015, we also prepared an updated climatic zone map. This study demonstrates the prospects of using fuzzy membership functions to delineate area classes for regionalization purpose.