Mapping the Fourth Dimension
Chapter Review: Tracking Animals in a Dynamic Environment: Remote Sensing Image Time Series Prominent theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking tells us that time is a property of matter, just like colour, mass, or temperature; without matter, time does not exist. Doc Brown in the Back To The Future movie trilogy tells us we must think fourth dimensionally in order to travel through time safely. The reality is, everyone and everything is traveling through time, all day, every day, at the minuscule but consistent rate of one second per second. Unfortunately for us in the mapping biz, this time travel stuff really complicates things since our traditional paper maps are only 2-dimensional and digital mapping is 3-dimensional at best. Since the beginning of, er… well, time, incorporating temporal information into spatial models has been challenging and is often outright excluded from consideration. Since time affects so much of the world around us, it just makes good sense to...