ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the practical tools of landscape assessment currently available to planners. The technology of remote sensing has expanded greatly in the years since World War II, enabling the mapping of a remarkable range of attributes of the physical landscape. The Industrial Revolution brought several significant developments in the mapping of land surfaces. Before 1800, the making of maps showing land areas had concentrated on the depiction of political and ownership boundaries and travel routes. Aerial photography is most often used by planners as a source of land use data. Several systematic photo-interpretation procedures have been developed for this purpose. The potential utility of detailed, systematic land use mapping for planners is great. Geographic data such as soil types and land uses are seldom rectilinear in configuration, and therefore the generalization of data to a large-scale grid results in a considerable loss of detail.
