Computation and Elicitation of Valleyness

Abstract

Existing methods for land surface form characterisation often focus on relatively simple landform element classifications and do not evaluate results with large scale participant experiments. This piece of research takes a semantics-grounded approach to characterising the landform valley. Based on definitions three algorithms to characterise valleys in a fuzzy way are introduced. Comparison of the results to assessments regarding the degree of being in a valley gained from over 800 participants in a questionnaire survey yields significant amounts of explained variance (R ² = 0.35–0.37). Furthermore, accounting for very ambiguously perceived stimuli showing vast low places leads to markedly improved regressions (R ² = 0.45–0.49), weighting of the data with a measure of uncertainty in judgment even more so (R ² = 0.50–0.55).