This paper researched the heritage sequence of Chinese ancient, near-modern and modern cartography, including two heritage aspects of cartographic theory-technologies and map data. The five most important and influential items of Chinese ancient cartography that have impacts on the near-modern cartography were the method of “counting distance and drawing maps according to affine squares”, the “Six Key-Point of Mapping” by Pei Xiu in the West-Jin dynasty, Jia Dan’s mapping method and map products in Tang dynasty, Shen Kuo’s 24 directions and “Seven Method of Mapping” in Song dynasty, and Zhu Siben’s cartographic theory, technologies and map products. There were three cartographic heritage lines in Ming dynasty, i.e., the heritage line of traditional territory and national mapping, the heritage line of nautical and coastal defense mapping, and the heritage line of embryonic stage of Chinese near-modern cartography after the introduction of western mapping technologies. As for the Qing dynasty, there were five cartographic heritage lines, which were the emperor sponsored national mapping, the non-governmental national mapping, the world map compilation, the nautical map compilation, and the engineering map making. And in the publican period, there were six cartographic heritage lines, which were the map making through private publishing houses, the edition of thematic maps, the nautical and sea & river route navigation mapping, the engineering map making, the topographic map making, and the map making for military affairs. In the modern society, the Chinese ancient and near-modern cartographic achievements are meaningful and helpful to the historical research and cultural relic exploration, while having some difficulties in map re-use, thus further research is necessary on the re-use of these maps. From the aspect of map representation, there is a tendency that the ancient and near-modern cartographic method would return to the modern cartography, but this is like a spiral rise of scientific development, representing a process of the negation of negation for the Chinese cartographic heritage and development from the ancient time to modern society.
This paper is finished on the purpose of writing an article of astronomical map for “Near-Modern Chinese Map Annals”, and we take a systematically study on the outstanding achievements of Chinese ancient astronomers in founding the "Theory of Sphere-Heavens", manufacturing “Armillary Sphere”, implementing astronomical observation and astronomical geodetic survey, and creating astronomical maps. The earliest recorded “Star table” was created by "Shi Shenfu" during the warring states period before in the 4th century B.C.; then, “Zhang Heng” created "Theory of Sphere-Heavens" and made the first “Turn Leaky Armillary Sphere” in the world during Han Dynasty in the 2nd century; Zhang Sui completed the national astronomical geodetic survey at 13 spots across China and is the first one who calculated the 1° arc length of local meridian at latitude 34° north to be 110.6 kilometers during Tang Dynasty; and Guo Shoujin” implemented "Universal Measurement" and "Leveling" during Yuan Dynasty. The ancient Chinese astronomical map discovered so far including: “the astronomical figure on a paint box cover in the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Sui county before the warring states period of China " which is created in 433 B.C.; “the start figure on the tomb murals indicating four quadrant symbols and 28 lunar mansions” which is created in the Western Han Dynasty in Xi’an city, Shaanxi Province; the "DunHuang star map" which contains more than 1350 stars and is created during 705-710 A.D.; the “Suzhou stone carving astronomical map" which contains more than 1440 stars and is created by “Huang Chang” in 1190 A.D.; the "constellation chart of crossing seas” which is created by Zheng He in 1405-1433 A.D.; the "Star Barrier Figure" which contains 1812 stars and is created by “Xu Guangqi” in the early 17th century; and the “total star map on the north and south sides of equator” which contains 1876 stars and is created by “Verbiest” in the mid 17th century. In a word, the ancient Chinese astronomical geodetic results provided foundation for global positioning, and the “circular methods” of ancient astronomical map are similar to the “azimuthal projection”, which greatly improved and enhanced China's traditional cartography. The scientific methods of making the astronomical map with “circular” showed the excellence of “Traditional Cartography Family”, and made important contribution in the process of developing Chinese traditional cartography.
The kilometer grid style and landscape painting style are two features of Chinese ancient maps. However, the positioning accuracy of ancient maps is very low due to the lack of a clear mathematical basis. It is difficult to apply map processing, map correction and geo-referencing on these ancient maps. This paper divides the current positioning datum of ancient maps into three types: one with no geo-reference, one with partial geo-reference, and one with definite geo-reference, and explores the map repairing methods from the following aspects: data selection, pre-processing, radiometric correction, and geographical information recovery. Besides, this paper takes some Chinese near modern maps as examples in several map matching experiments, adapts different spatial positioning methods, such as feature point correction, matching by grid, and relative position shift, to complete corrections between Chinese ancient maps and modern maps, and focuses on the mathematical relationship in the square grid maps and different geo-reference systems and projection systems. Finally, we try to establish the mathematical relationships between the corrected ancient maps and the accurate maps, and study the relationship between “six key points of mapping” and the modern coordinates system.
The navigational charts in China's Ming dynasty are famous all over the world at that time, such as the ‘Hydrographic Guide Map’ so far discovered in the early Ming Dynasty, which collected the detailed shipping route to transport grain from the south to the north along the coastline between Ningbo and Liao river over thousands of years; and the ‘ZhengHe Navigational Chart’, which reveals the style and features in a period of great prosperity on Chinese ancient navigation achievements and navigational chart techniques and includes 14 seaway routes crossing Asia, Africa and Europe recognized as the first one in the world. The inheritance and development of the ‘Maritime Silk Road’ since Han dynasty, once again advocates the main purpose of the traditional business between china and foreign countries, which is the culture exchange and local product trading. The ‘Sea Route Book’ recorded the navigational guide of South China Sea as the legacy and at the cost of generations of fishermen's life during the ancient times. The ‘Ryukyu Nautical Charts’ shows the distribution of navigation routes that ancient Chinese navigators recorded during their visits to Ryukyu, Taiwan, Japan and other places across the east ocean of China. The ‘Selden Map of China’ keeps the functions of a general nautical map, and perfected the nautical chart series of Ming dynasty. This paper also systematically discusses the realistic style of the navigational charts, their matching descriptions or drawings in Ming dynasty, as well as the adoptions of ‘Opposite Scenery Method’, ‘Lead Star Board’, ‘Water Compass’, ‘Astronomical Observation Instruments’, ‘Speed Detection On Board’ and other unique techniques.
The Yellow River is called "the cradle of Chinese civilization", and the Grand Canal has taken the important responsibility of river transportation, while their importance also reveals that there were a lot of ancient maps about the Yellow River and Grand Canal. This paper mainly discusses the drawing characteristics, content summarization and value analysis of water conservancy maps in Ming and Qing Dynasty through exploring many ancient Yellow River maps and Grand Canal maps. The yellow river and canal maps in Ming and Qing Dynasty are divided into two categories based on map representations, which are the drawing (annals, illustrated) maps recorded in the water conservancy books and the illustrated maps. The illustrated map is the main type adopted in Ming and Qing dynasty which portrays the scenes of rivers and other facilities. The illustrated maps are mostly drawn in the forms of landscape painting and image rendering. Theses scroll maps aim to reproduce the historical scenes vividly. All the landscape features along the Yellow River and Grand Canal are aggregating toward the centerline of the river. This type of map can easily arouse the reader's visual resonance and build a complete picture of all features. The ancient Yellow River maps and Grand Canal maps, especially the maps produced in Ming and Qing Dynasty, based on the map drawing techniques, can be divided into three types: one is scene reproduced expand map, which is the most popular type of maps in Ming and Qing Dynasty; in addition to this type of painting maps, the painted square class maps and the latitude and longitude maps are also developed in Ming and Qing Dynasty. But these two types of ancient maps are not so popular at that time because they are not as good as the painting image maps comparing their practical and artistic aspects. No matter what types of ancient river and canal maps, they should be taken as historic legacies in mapping research, conservancy research and construction. However, in terms of their functions and values, whether the expansion scroll maps, square meter class maps, or latitude and longitude maps, are all rare historic legacies to the ancient cartography, historical geography and ancient water conservancy research, today's map research and geography research, which is worthy of in-depth study and discussion,
“HaiGou Tuzhi” is an atlas of the world, which was edited by Wei Yuan, who complied with the great trust of Lin Zexu. Based on the “four continents annals" created by Lin Zexu, “HaiGouTuzhi” was then published three times in a row between 1842 and 1852. Some mainstream scholars in China laugh at “it's childish”, and China's imperial palace put it on the shelf. However, it was spread to Japan and the book sold quickly, which effectively promoted the reform revolution of Japan started in the middle of the 19th century. Until the late 20th century, China's implementation of reform and opening launched the research boom of "HaiGou Tuzhi" by historian, geographer and cartographer, and they speak highly of it as "the most comprehensive magnum opus on the world for geography and history", "the first world atlas compiled in the near-modern of China", and so on. Firstly, this paper analyzed "HaiGuo Tuzhi" with its 100 volumes, which including 75 maps and 880,000 texts divided into 10 parts, including chapters of "The preface", "Coastal defense", "Maps", "Annals", "Religious calendar", "Countries in general", "Coastal defense in general", "Foreign affairs record set", "Weapons and equipment", and "The earth’s astronomical theory". In the meantime, this research outlines the multi-angle studies and comments on "HaiGuo Tuzhi" from China and Japan, mainly discusses the values of cartography such as "designing idea”, “content arrangement”, ”compiling technology" and so on; as well as introduces the editing strategy of "Learning from Foreigners to Competing Foreigners", and successful experiences and focuses on distinguishing data authenticity and the comprehensive genre in editing “HaiGuo Tuzhi”. All of these have important practical significance. At last, we suggest that today's cartographer should try to absorb the cartography “nutrition” from "HaiGuo Tuzhi" and positively response to the new requirements of the era of deepening reform and opening up, to compile and publish a new comprehensive atlas of the world with "real data, large-scale and integrated information, and provide services to people" as soon as possible.
Map drawing in near modern China (Ming Dynasty, Qing Dynasty and Republic of China) is the best representation of Chinese ancient cartography. The later stage of Chinese feudal society was the transition period that ancient cartography was changing to modern cartography. It’s necessary to research the maps made in the near modern period. Provincial and regional maps of near modern China reveal more characteristics than other types of maps in that period. Through collecting the maps of near modern China, the characteristics of provincial and regional maps of near modern China were discussed from two aspects, including the arrangement systems and expression methods. The arrangement systems of provincial and regional maps in near modern China were further divided into two parts, one is the different publication formats during the same period, such as single pieces of maps from historical records and maps included in atlas and encyclopaedia, the other is the arrangement system classification and subdivision based on administrative divisions. The expression methods of provincial and regional maps in near modern China were divided into three parts, including the expression method characteristics of single provincial and regional map, provincial and regional maps in encyclopaedia, and provincial and regional atlas. It is of significant value to research the provincial and regional maps of near modern China. Through these studies and comparisons of modern atlas within various periods, we can further study the peculiarities of provincial administrative division, inner structure of provincial physical geography unit and strengthening management of province and region. This paper lays a foundation to the further study of the provincial and regional maps of near modern China, and also provided a reference for the drawing of provincial and regional maps and the compiling of atlas in modern China.
Since the Enlarged Terrestrial Atlas (1541) compiled by the outstanding cartographer Luo Hongxian (1504-1564) in the Ming Dynasty and the incoming western precise mapping technology brought by Matteo Ricci, China's cartographic technology had entered the academy of modern cartography, and then gradually matured during Ming, Qing and Republic of China periods. With the constant development and application of today’s cartography, the summarized map symbols and ordinary two-dimensional maps can no longer meet the needs of readers. Cartographers began to explore new types of expressions, such as Visual Reality and 3D maps, which resembles the traditional meticulous methods appeared in old Chinese maps. Therefore, it’s necessary to study the cartography technology and expression method in Chinese Modern Cartography period. Basing on plenty old maps produced in Chinese Modern Cartography period and related academic materials, this paper overviewed the cartography technology in these periods, summarized the map elements and expression methods adopted, in order to provide some inspirations to the development of today’s Chinese cartography.
China is a country with centuries’old historical civilization. City culture is one of the most important parts in the long history of the Chinese splendid national culture.Following the prosperity of human civilization, a large amount of cities with various sizes appeared and kept growing continuously. Some cities have developed into world-famous with abundant historical culture and significant historic value, which are originated from the achievements of Chinese ancient civilization. In the present day, when cities are developing rapidly, it isparticularly important to study the evolution of cities since ancient times. One efficient way to achieve this is to study city maps which reflect the spatial pattern of cities in a relatively accurate sense. Therefore, city maps can provide great reference values for exploring the changesin city patterns from a historical view. This paper aims to study the modern city maps produced during the period from the Ming Dynasty to the Republican period. In terms of the inheritance of traditional ancient city maps and the developments encouraged by the western cartography, this paper intends to explore the characteristics, developing trends and values of Chinese modern city maps. On one hand, modern city maps had not completely got rid of the features of Chinese traditional city maps from the aspects of method and content; on the other hand, modern city maps had also been influenced and motivated by western knowledge. Therefore, Chinese modern city maps were gradually developing towards diversification, thematization and modernization during the process of inheritance and development, reflecting the trait of city development and regional features at that time. This paper also applied the case study method to explore the Chinese modern city maps with typical examples from various time and cities, and to further discuss and make comments on the representations, contents, techniques as well as significant values of these maps.
At the end of the 16th century, western cartography technology was introduced to China. AT this moment, the relatively independent traditional Chinese cartography was influenced by the western country. Until the formation of the Republic of China, western precise mapping technology had influenced the development of traditional Chinese cartography in many aspects, including the latitude and longitude control and the projective transformation. The main research direction of this paper is focusing on 3 historical periods of China, including the end of Ming Dynasty, the beginning of Qing Dynasty and the end of Qing Dynasty, and emphatically analyzing the background of western cartography technology at every period. Under its influence, some map works emerged. The changes of traditional Chinese cartography are summarized. At first, the traditional Chinese cartography developed independently and resisted western cartography. But afterwards, the former fully absorbed the latter. Finally, the traditional cartography which was transformed from the old method to the new method built up the modern cartography theory which meets the development demand of China. Furthermore, this paper summarized the corresponding historical experience, hoping to illuminate the mapping personnel nowadays.
Maps of scenic spots in ancient China were originated from Chinese landscape painting and thus associated with it closely. At the same time, the ancients paid more attention to the artistic features of maps due to time limitations as well as the lack of ancient scientific requirements for mapping. Ancient map of scenic spot is products of China's unique art and culture. It is the combination of Chinese traditional ideology and culture, calligraphy, painting and the other types of arts and it has important cultural and artistic value. This paper discusses the artistic characteristics of ancient scenic spot maps in terms of cartography, generalization, scaling, orientation, color, annotation and traditional ideology. Also, the corresponding artistic characteristics are presented by the attached maps to show the beauty of ancient art. Chinese culture is extensive and profound, and it contains a variety of ideas, such as Confucianism, Taoist thought and Buddhist thought. These thoughts have a profound impact on the development of ancient map art. Modern map pays great attention to the scientific nature leading to the lack of artistic quality. Nevertheless, the ancient Chinese map of scenic spot is inspired by Chinese traditional ideology, culture, calligraphy, painting and other forms of art ,which can well make up for its defects. Studying the artistic features of ancient scenic spot maps not only has an important reference significance for the development of contemporary cartography, but also plays an important role for inheriting Chinese traditional culture, therefore we should dig deeper into these cultural treasures and also introduce Chinese culture to the world.
Land surface temperature (LST) is one of the key parameters in land surface processes, and hemispherical radiative surface temperature is also an important input parameter for land surface models. However, notably the LST derived from satellite scale data is affected by the variation of viewing zenith angles. Therefore, it is necessary to develop methods to estimate the hemispherical radiative temperature from the satellite-derived LST before inputting the hemispherical radiative temperature into land surface models. This paper firstly analyzes the relationship between the directional and hemispherical radiative temperatures simulated by a thermal-infrared radiative transfer model and a parameterized model for flat and homogeneous canopy, considering leaf inclination distribution function (LIDF), leaf area index (LAI), solar zenith angle and viewing azimuth angle. Then, a best directional radiative temperature is proposed to substitute the hemispherical radiative temperature. In addition, this paper also briefly describes the angular effect of the radiative surface temperature via field experimental study. The experiments were conducted over a homogenous and flat grassy lawn using two KT-15.85D infrared radiometers mounted on a multi-angle observation device. The grass radiative surface temperature under different viewing angles was measured by one radiometer through rotating the arm of the multi-angle observation device. The radiative surface temperature at nadir was measured by the other radiometer on a fixed arm. The results reveal that the radiative surface temperature increases with the increase of viewing zenith angle and it depends slightly on the variation of viewing azimuth angle. Comparing the off-nadir radiative temperatures to those measured at nadir, it exhibits a maximum difference of 2.7 K when the viewing zenith angle is at 75°, which implies that the angular effect of infrared radiation does exist. Comparing and analyzing the directional and hemispherical radiative temperatures, we found that the directional radiative temperature measured at a viewing zenith angle of 51° can be the best substitute for the hemispherical radiative temperature when the LAI is below 1.0.
The accurate mapping of bare soil land is of vital significance to soil erosion treatment. Satellite remote sensing has become a popular technology used in bare soil mapping, owing to the capability of monitoring bare soil dynamics in a cost-effective manner. Nowadays, Landsat imagery with a spatial resolution of 30 m has been widely used in previous work for bare soil extraction. Nevertheless, due to the limitation of its spatial resolution, the Landsat image can hardly meet the requirement of fine-scale bare soil mapping. Thus, a method for higher resolution bare soil mapping was proposed in this paper using SPOT-5 imagery as the main data. The Normalized Difference Soil Index (NDSI) was firstly utilized to enhance the bare soil features from the SPOT-5multispectral 10 m image. However, the enhanced soil information was mixed with the built-up land features due to the confusion between the two categories. To solve this problem, the Normalized Difference Impervious Surface Index (NDISI) was further introduced to separate the built-up features from the bare soils. Due to the lack of a thermal band in SPOT-5 imagery, which is required in computing NDISI, a near synchronous Landsat TM thermal band 6 was fine-sharpened to 10 m resolution, and afterwards, it was added to the SPOT-5 bands to calculate NDISI. Accordingly, a model was used in mapping the bare soil, based on the NDSI and NDISI. Finally, the extraction results of bare soil at 10 m resolution were obtained through the model, which achieved an overall accuracy of 95.4%. It suggests that the two-index based method can effectively eli- minate the confusion between bare soil land and built-up land, and can extract the bare soil features with a higher accuracy. In addition, the bare soil features extracted from SPOT imagery and TM imagery respectively, were further compared. It is found that a higher spatial resolution can lead to a more accurate extraction result. Therefore, the 10 m resolution SPOT-5 image is considered to be more adaptive and useful in bare soil mapping for soil erosion treatment.
Plant community is a significant content in the ecosystem. Traditional investigation method for plant community is mainly based on statistical sampling, which is limited by the data acquisition from complex terrain areas. In contrast, high-resolution remote sensing technique provides a convenient way to quickly access data in a large area. To overcome the shortcomings derived from the high dimensional features, which is caused by related data increasing, we choose the algorithm of projection pursuit learning network (PPLN) along with field samples of typical plant communities to realize a fast classification on the vegetation in the east of Shenzhen. Then,in the experiment, the spectral and texture information extracted from Pléiades images, and the terrain interpolated from topographic map are selected and used to build high dimensional features, which is crucial to the vegetation classification using remote sensing images. The learning network for projection pursuit is applied to discriminating the typical communities in both plantation and natural secondary forest in the study area. Compared with Maximum-likelihood classification (MLC) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), PPLN can achieve more accurate results for plant community classification. As a conclusion, the plant community classification with PPLN meets the requirements of the investigation project, achieves the quick updating of some basic information related to forest resources, and looks forward to involve in some other ecological research as well.
The spectral angle mapper (SAM) is a spectral matching method. This method can determine the types of target objects through quantifying the spectral similarity between a target pixel spectrum and a known reference spectrum.SAM has been widely used in rock type identi?cation that uses multispectral data. In the most existing studies, a mean re?ectance spectrum of a specific lithological training area has been used as the reference spectrum for the lithological class in SAM. However, the SAM, which uses the mean spectrum, does not take into account the spectral variability, which is an inherent property of many rocks. Andthe spectral variabilityseriously affects SAM classification results.In order to eliminate the impactof the spectral variability inside the lithological classes, a SAM method based on multiple reference spectra is used in this research. First, a geological map of the study area was used to select training areas forfive lithological classes from the Landsat-8 data of the study area.Then the spectral variability inside the lithological classes and the separability between the lithological classeswereexamined. At last, both ofthe SAM with mean reference spectrum and the multiple reference spectra based SAM wereused in lithological mapping of Landsat-8 data in the study area.The results show that the multiple reference spectra based SAM successfully eliminated the influence of the spectral variability on the SAM with mean reference spectrum, and madesigni?cant improvement tothe accuracy of lithological mapping.
