They talk with Donald Falk, a fire ecologist at the University of Arizona, pyrogeographer Jennifer Marlon of Yale University, forest ecologist Dan Binkley of Colorado State University and paleoecologist Erica Smithwick of Penn State University.

What is interesting is they all agree/indicate that the current/trending fire cycle doesn’t jive with historical ecosystems and emphasize the difficulty of predicting future successions.

Yet, there is this line at the end, “If people want to prevent the transformation, it’s still possible to do so through controlled burns and brush removal. ‘The pressures are very strong, but they’re not inevitable’.”

which seems to differ from the last quote you posted above from Dr. Allen.

But wanted to bring them up here, to point out their big flaw, which is the inablilty to overlay the different conditions which would begin to expose cultural/racial/economic. I think this overlaying is the thing that you are talking about and I think it is an excellent point.

I also think that these are part of a larger group of maps that map non-spatial relationships. This brings the cultural/racial/economic into a direct spatial expression.

The other end of the spectrum in these are spatial maps that reveal the cultural/racial/economic. As recently shown on the Funambulist:

http://thefunambulist.net/2012/06/01/palestine-the-cartography-of-road-segregation-by-visualizing-palestine/

Rather than a flaw, this seems like a strength of this method of mapping: you can see that certain patterns of living which are stereotypically suburban (home ownership) do not apply evenly to what spatial distribution (distance from city center, for instance) would tell you are “suburbs”.

(I do think that home ownership is part of the stereotypical understanding of what is suburban — the role of suburban life within the American Dream, etc. — even though, as both you and the maps themselves correctly point out, reality is more complicated.)

Via Mammoth —– by rholmes   [Ship tracks -- "narrow clouds... form[ed] when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships either emit directly as exhaust or that form as a result of gases within the…

One consideration with the map suggestions you’ve proposed in the last paragraph is that the number of shades needed to represent that many overlapping data layers on one map would very quickly escalate beyond the Venn Diagram color model employed currently, and would instead necessitate needing a shading system from (e.g. from white to black) indicating to the degree of “urban-ness” of an area. But that would lead to the drawback of less specific information being contained, and the viewer relies more on the map-makers judgement of what constitutes being “urban”, and less on deciphering their own trends from the data.