Visualizing Landscapes by Geospatial Techniques

This chapter will provide an overview on the manifold approaches to the visualization of landscapes. There are many techniques on the market nowadays, but we first start with a historical view on the development of the different presentation methods of landscape models. In the beginning, there have been historical maps, followed by physical 3D models of cities and landscapes and then entering the digital world of GIS-systems, integrating nadir viewing remote sensing data with equidistant topographical maps including contour lines and 2.5 dimensional shaded relief maps of Digital Terrain Models. The second paragraph is dedicated to recent hardware technology and image processing techniques of remote sensing data in order to derive height information of the landscape. Section 2.3 summarizes the Digital Landscape Models, the basic geodata infrastructure available through the German surveying agencies. These multiscale national topographical datasets lead to the harmonization within the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE). The last paragraph gives some examples of applications in geomorphology, landscape evolution models and animated maps as well as mixed reality, artificial intelligence and landscape architecture and planning. Finally, we not only try to provide a comprehensive overview of the published literature, we also give a comprehensive overview on the available techniques in Fig. 8, where we plotted the “amount of virtuality” against the user involvement. The digital visualization of landscapes as well as the spatial modelling of landscapes under predefined border conditions are a prerequisite for future sustainable decision making.