Jordan Boan, "Methods for Generating Land Suitability Maps..."

One of the most basic responsibilities of a landscape architect is to determine the suitable land for a particular use or development. This is done by mapping various factors and types, combining this data, observing the relationships of the overlayed factors, and then using these conclusions to determine the most suitable areas. There are many different methods for mapping this data: gestalt, ordinal combination, linear combination, nonlinear combination, factor combination, cluster analysis, rules of combination, and hierarchical combination. Each of these methods bears its own advantages and disadvantages, namely being applicable to different scales and requirements concerning the level of detail. The gestalt method, for example, is best used on a smaller scale design where most factors can be observed through aerial photography, site visits, and survey data. On a larger scale, the methods of linear and nonlinear combination followed by the rules of combination method would be best. This allows for the combining of related data sets then the comparison of the resulting set to other sets to which it bears no dependence.