On some theoretical and practical features of forestal maps

Abstract

The authors comment on the evolution of the Spanish vegetation charts over the XXth century. First of all some forestal maps were published, exclusively based on field work, at an scale of 1:200,000 for some provinces (1930); later, a complete forestal map of Spain (inland and islands) was achieved by Ceballos in 1966 (scale 1:400,000). Following the air photograms interpretation, many other vegetation maps appeared, until the publication of Rivas Martínez’s «Map of vegetation series of Spain» in 1987 (1:400,000). Recently, during the last 20 years, planty of regional and local maps appeared —even at an scale of 1:50,000 or 1:25,000—, but the most important was the new Ruiz de la Torre’s «Forestal map of Spain» at an scale of 1:200,000. This is in our opinion an essential work not only for management purposes but also as a reference for the modern cartography by means of teledetection and numerical information.