Landuse Analyst Glossary

A reference dictionary defining spatial, agricultural, demographic, palaeoclimate, and wildfire terms used across Landuse Analyst.

A

Anisotropic Cost Surface

A spatial friction grid where movement cost varies depending on direction of travel — e.g. walking uphill vs downhill along terrain contours.

Arable Catchment Area

The geographic zone surrounding a settlement containing sufficient cultivable soil to satisfy annual settlement caloric demands.

B

Biennial Fallow

An agricultural land management practice where cultivated fields are cropped every second year ($1:1$ ratio) — resting half the land annually to restore soil moisture and nitrogen.

C

Caloric Density ($K_c$)

The energy output of a crop expressed in kilocalories per kilogram of harvested weight ($\text{kcal/kg}$). E.g., wheat $\approx 3,300 \text{ kcal/kg}$.

Cellular Automaton (HCA)

A discrete spatial model operating on a regular hex grid where each cell’s state evolves based on its local neighbourhood. Used in Landuse Analyst’s wildfire solver.

Competition Index ($\chi$)

The percentage of a settlement’s catchment area that overlaps with neighbouring settlement catchments.

D

Dead Sea Highstand / Lake Lisan

The Pleistocene water body that occupied the Jordan Rift Valley. At its highstand ($\approx 24,000 \text{ BP}$), Lake Lisan reached $-160\text{ m}$ MSL.

DEM (Digital Elevation Model)

A raster dataset representing continuous terrain elevation above mean sea level.

F

Friction Raster

A spatial grid where each cell value represents travel impedance or delay multiplier.

Ford Site

A shallow river location where water barriers are permeable — allowing travel across at standard unpenalised speed.

H

HCA (Hexagonal Cellular Automaton)

The in-process hexagonal fire spread solver in Landuse Analyst.

I

Isochrone

A contour line on a map connecting points that can be reached within equal travel time from an origin point (e.g. 15-min, 30-min contours).

Iso-hyet

A spatial contour line connecting geographic points of equal annual precipitation ($\text{mm/year}$).

M

Minetti Equation

An empirical polynomial equation (Minetti et al., 1987) predicting metabolic energy cost ($\text{J/kg}\cdot\text{m}$) as a 5th-order function of slope gradient.

O

Octagonal Cell Propagation

An 8-neighbour grid search algorithm that accumulates orthogonal step costs ($d$) and diagonal step costs ($\sqrt{2}d$) to eliminate Manhattan distance distortion.

P

Palaeo-GIS

Spatial information systems adapted for reconstructing ancient environments, past climate horizons, and prehistoric settlement patterns.

PPN (Pre-Pottery Neolithic)

Early Holocene archaeological period (ca. 10,000–8,000 BC) marked by early plant domestication and permanent stone architecture.

R

Rate of Spread (ROS)

The forward linear speed at which a fire front propagates across terrain, expressed in metres per minute ($\text{m/min}$).

T

Tobler’s Hiking Function

An exponential velocity function (Tobler, 1993) predicting human walking speed based on terrain slope incline.

V

Von Thünen Rings

Concentric spatial land-use zones around a settlement reflecting economic transportation costs: intensive gardening (inner), arable agriculture (middle), pastoral grazing (outer).

Voronoi Tessellation

A spatial partitioning of a plane into regions based on distance to specified generator points (site centroids).

W

WISE Engine

A remote landscape-scale wave propagation solver for wildfire perimeters.