Mapping Environmental Health: Choice of Data Organisation and Colour Schemes

Abstract

The term ‘health’ to denote wellness or well-being e.g. its use for ‘economic health’ with respect to communities in a spatial entity was first used by Thompson J. H. et al. in case of New York State. The other such usage are ‘health of oceans’, ‘financial health’, ‘ecological health’ or ‘health of ecosystem’. The present paper, in an effort to add a more holistic scope to the term health, attempts to extend the term’s sphere of connotation to include environment too and use it to denote the different states of environment’s wellness. The paper aims to find a data organisation which is compatible with environment health data sets and select a classification routine which matches this organisation. In addition, an attempt is being made lay down a map design approach, particularly in the area of symbolisation related to colour choices. The variables or indicators of environmental health are grouped into indicators related to (1) environmental systems (2) environmental stresses and (3) human vulnerability. Indicators in the different groups can be combined, by a suitable statistical routine, into an index which could function as a numerical or digital measure that expresses the state of the health of environment. Environmental health status data have a divergent spatial structure. Data in such structures diverges in ascending negative and positive values from a critical or normal value in geospace. This data mapped through cartographically and perceptually organised dimensions of colours provide the most effective way of apprehending information from data visualisations. Selection of organised and ordered paths across multidimensional colour models such as Munsell which result in creating logical progressions of colour have been selected and are suggested to map this kind of data.