Commemorative Album for the 100th Anniversary of Mr. Chen Shupeng’s Birth

Summary

Against the background of the centenary of Academician Chen Shupeng’s birth, this paper reviews his publications, scientific practices, and intellectual trajectory to clarify the connotation, origins, and future inheritance of Geo-information Tupu. “Tupu,” a Chinese concept without a fully equivalent English term, is understood as a general methodology that uses maps, graphs, charts, spectra, and related visual forms to represent complex phenomena and reveal their underlying regularities. Geo-science Tupu applies this methodology to geographical phenomena and processes, expressing their spatial structures, temporal evolution, multidimensional attributes, and internal relationships through systematic graphic series. Geo-information Tupu advances this approach by combining quantitative geographical information, geo-databases, geographic computation, remote sensing, and geographic information systems. It seeks to represent, analyze, and simulate geographical patterns and processes in space and time, thereby reconstructing the past, assessing the present, anticipating the future, and explaining the laws governing interactions between humanity and nature. The paper argues that this idea emerged not as an isolated proposition but as a synthesis of Chen’s lifelong scholarship. His early education established a strong foundation in geography and integrated regional thinking; his subsequent work in comprehensive geography and map design brought systemic geographical analysis together with graphic representation; and his later leadership in remote sensing, GIS, and Digital Earth supplied the technological conditions needed to make Tupu quantitative, dynamic, multidimensional, and computational. Proposed in the late 1990s, Geo-information Tupu both inherited the Chinese intellectual tradition of integrating maps with historical and geographical narratives and anticipated the transition of modern geo-information science from data acquisition and information processing toward knowledge discovery and intelligent cognition. To carry this scientific inquiry forward, the authors identify several priorities. First, holographic maps and multidimensional dynamic visualization should be developed as an expressive foundation for detecting previously unrecognized geographical phenomena and laws. Second, remote sensing observation of the land-surface “spectrum” should be guided by the geographical logic of “map” analysis so that spectral detection ultimately contributes to explaining complex spatial distributions and their formative mechanisms. Third, research should center on human–environment relationships and establish a cognitive framework connecting objective geographical space with digitally constructed virtual space. Finally, Geo-information Tupu should support the automated discovery, organization, association, and application of geographical knowledge. In this way, it can provide a theoretical and methodological basis for automated and intelligent geographic knowledge graphs, deepen understanding of Earth systems, and extend Chen Shupeng’s strategic vision for the continuing development of geo-information science.