Environmental Mapping

Jean Trottier a professor lecturing in the faculty of Landscape Architecture at the University of Manitoba spoke on several different topics related to the design complex. One of the topics, which I found highly interesting, was the idea of Environmental Mapping. Environmental Mapping is an incorporated part of the Biophysical context of the landscape around us. This type of mapping is an informative way of looking at topology in the specific area and relating the separate parts with each other. By using a universal base map, you are able to id, map and locate where absolutely everything is. How specific your map becomes is entirely based on how detailed you make each layer. An example that Trottier gave is a map, which gives the ability to site an area of best fit. This example incorporated soil types and water usage. Each type of soil and water use was coloured in different light depths on two separate layers, where the darker areas represented areas which would not be best fit areas. By incorporating both maps together and looking at where the light areas were, the reader got a sense of where the most logical best fit location would be for the site. This type of mapping originally seemed to be confusing and yet once I thought about the concept I understood that, the information that comes from this map is relatively simple to come by and yet it creates an intriguing and useful way of finding the ideal area for a certain site.

~Trevor