That’s a Relief: Assessing Beauty, Realism, and Landform Clarity in Terrain Maps

Terrain maps are often composed of shaded relief along with other thematic layers to create aesthetically pleasing and clear maps of the physical landscape. Despite that the interplay of layers is of primary concern to a cartographer, much of the research on terrain mapping has focused on testing individual layers. This research aimed to fill the gap by testing the perceived aesthetics of beauty and realism, in combination with landform clarity of terrain maps when combining shaded relief with common thematic terrain layers using an online user study. Ultimately, neither shaded relief nor thematic terrain layers were the sole contributors to aesthetics or clarity rating scores. Given the results, I argue that a successful terrain map, that accounts for the aesthetics beauty, realism, and visual clarity of specific landforms, is created through a combination of layers, not a single dataset.2023-10-1