Classification and Boundary Vagueness in Mapping Presettlement Forest Types

Presettlement forest types were mapped as fuzzy sets from point data representing trees contained in General Land O ce survey notes (circa 1850) for Chippewa County, Michigan. The resulting representation agreed with a polygon map of the same forest types at 66% of the locations (represented as grid cells) in the county. Boundary vagueness was de® ned in relation to the slope of a linear function ® tted to the negative relation between entropy of forest types and distance to polygon boundaries. The similarity between forest type compositions (i.e. classi® cation ambiguity) was shown to account for 55% of the variation in boundary vagueness.