Meanings
- not comparablegeographyRelating to a kind of areal interpolation that preserves density within defined regions.
If intrazonal homogeneity cannot be maintained in cases where similar land uses lie in adjacent zones and dissimilar land uses lie within the same zone, then the pycnophylactic method may be favored.
1988, Peter Stanley Lindquist, Traffic Zones Reconsidered, page 662 more examples
Although the pycnophylactic method is arguably more appropriate for isopleth mapping than point-based interpolation methods, it must be emphasized that the method should only be used with continuous phenomenon.
2005, Terry A. Slocum, Robert B. McMaster, Fritz C. Kessler, Thematic Cartography and Geographic Visualization, page 286We iterated the algorithm with 20 census variables (see Section 1.3.3) to obtain population density surfaces. In all cases, the pycnophylactic property [85] was verified by adding population density surface pixels and comparing them with their original values.
2019 December 23, Fabián Santos, Valerie Graw, Santiago Bonilla, “A geographically weighted random forest approach for evaluate forest change drivers in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon”, in PLOS One
Origin
From pycno- + phylactic. Coined by Waldo Tobler in his 1979 paper "Smooth Pycnophylactic Interpolation for Geographical Regions", Journal of the American Statistical Association, volume 74, number 367, pages 519-536.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
pycnophylactic. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pycnophylactic
“pycnophylactic.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pycnophylactic. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “pycnophylactic,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pycnophylactic.
Source: pycnophylactic on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.