The communication of weather and climate phenomena plays an important role in everyday life as well as in current debates. This article focuses on the representation of absolute temperatures in selected temperature maps from media and official sources. Its core objective is to analyze the usability of color schemes. An analytical and an empirical study were conducted to evaluate the usability of the color schemes. Specifically...

This case study presents an innovative approach for explaining wildfire susceptibility through a web-based Geospatial eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (GeoXAI) system. By addressing limitations in traditional GeoXAI tools, such as the lack of geographical context for model predictions and local explanation, this system integrates state-of-the-art XAI methods with open-source geospatial technologies. Applied to the wildfire-...

Dark mode is an increasingly common design option in which a dark screen background is used with light-coloured text and graphic elements. This option is, therefore, also relevant for the design of screen maps. This article examines the question of whether a “light-is-more bias” also applies in dark mode for the display of choropleth maps, analogous to the “dark-is-more bias” with light backgrounds (i.e. that dark colours are...

Series or animations of classified choropleth maps are an important form of reproducing multi-temporal, cardinally scaled data sets, especially in media. However, there are problems with such representations that are not taken into account by the known methods of data classification (such as equidistant grouping or quantiles), and therefore lead to visualizations that are not sufficiently suitable for use. On the one hand, dif...

A well-known problem with choropleth maps is the cognitively induced effect that larger regions are perceived as more dominant. Consequently, unsatisfactory detection rates for small areas can result, which becomes relevant when important spatial features or patterns are explored (e.g., regions with maximum values). One possible approach to avoiding the area size bias is the use of cartograms. While there is already some work...

Volunteered geographic information is often generated as voluminous point data, leading to geometric and thematic clutter when presented on maps. To solve these clutter problems, cartography provides various point generalization operations such as aggregation, simplification or selection. While these operations reduce the total number of points and therefore improve the readability, information preservation could be harmed whe...

Geospatial information science (GI science) is concerned with the development and application of geodetic and information science methods for modeling, acquiring, sharing, managing, exploring, analyzing, synthesizing, visualizing, and evaluating data on spatio-temporal phenomena related to the Earth. As an interdisciplinary scientific discipline, it focuses on developing and adapting information technologies to understand proc...