ABSTRACT
Surface modeling refers to the process of simulating a surface through a scattered point-form data set, a line-form data set and/or an area-form data set. Surface modeling is aimed at formulating an object in a grid system, in which each grid cell contains an estimate of the object that is representative for that particular location. Representing data in grid form has at least four advantages (Martin and Bracken, 1991; Deichmann, 1996; Yue et al., 2008, 2009, 2010): (1) a regular grid can be easily reaggregated to any areal arrangement required; (2) producing ecological data in grid form is one way of ensuring compatibility between heterogeneous data sets; (3) data in grid form makes the fusion of multiresolution and multisource information easier, and (4) converting data into grid form can provide a way to avoid some of the problems imposed by artificial boundaries.
