Two orders of wall‐to‐wall geographic data

Abstract From personal observations of recent published works, the term “wall‐to‐wall” has been rather loosely employed to describe geographically extensive data. Therefore, an assessment of peer‐reviewed literature was conducted to help classify how the term has been used in remote sensing and geographical analyses. A bibliographic search located 394 published works that referenced wall‐to‐wall data. These works were reviewed for key items such as the date and location of the studies, the mode of use, and the type of information related directly to the term. Prior to 2000, the term was used sparingly in the literature; its use has increased considerably since the year 2010. The main finding from our assessment is that the term has been used in several different ways to describe a set of geographically extensive data. A substantial percentage of the published works that referenced wall‐to‐wall data associated the term with airborne LiDAR (ALS) and other remotely sensed data subsequently used as input for geographical analyses. The works reviewed also commonly associated the term with products of geographical analyses such as databases describing aboveground biomass. Wall‐to‐wall data were found to be bound geographically by both the edges of regular shapes and the edges of highly irregular shapes. In some published works, wall‐to‐wall data also referred to discontiguous pieces of land. As a result of this investigation, two orders of wall‐to‐wall data are offered: (1) wall‐to‐wall data provides spatially complete, extensive, and continuous or discontinuous information within the normal geographic dimension of a remotely sensed product , and (2) wall‐to‐wall data provides spatially complete (or nearly complete) knowledge for land (or water) areas that may be discontiguous, and whose boundary or edge is irregularly shaped, having been delineated manually or by an automated process . Using these orders as a guide, the communication of science findings can be made more precise by providing a clear understanding of how data used within a geographical analysis can be considered ‘wall‐to‐wall’.