Changing perceptions in Mediterranean geography: the role of geospatial tools

Geography and Cartography have both their foundation in the Mediterranean. Recent advances in geospatial tools such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) have radically changed the way that we look at Mediterranean geographies. The shift from mapping to map analysis marks a turning point in geography as a discipline. This chapter is a review of the role of geospatial tools in changing perceptions and geographies in the Mediterranean. The first section deals with the nature of GIS and remote sensing and their basic principles. The second part focuses on mapping environmental perception, as con-fined to three main aspects: reconstructing the past, documenting the present and predicting the future. Reconstruction of the past includes the use of visualization techniques which simulate past landscapes or the direct identification of palaeo-features through remote sensing techniques. On documenting the present we dis-cuss the ways that GIS-based cartography creates new spatial representations. Predicting the future includes a range of applications from modelling species and vegetation distribution under environmental change to simulating future land-scapes under different land-use scenarios. The chapter provides examples in the Mediterranean where the above techniques have been applied and discusses some of the challenges that the application of geospatial analysis in the Mediterranean might face in the future.