Transportation infrastructure, such as road or railroad networks, represent a fundamental component of our civilization. For sustainable planning and informed decision making, a thorough ...understanding of the long-term evolution of transportation infrastructure such as road networks is crucial. However, spatially explicit, multi-temporal road network data covering large spatial extents are scarce and rarely available prior to the 2000s. Herein, we propose a framework that employs increasingly available scanned and georeferenced historical map series to reconstruct past road networks, by integrating abundant, contemporary road network data and color information extracted from historical maps. Specifically, our method uses contemporary road segments as analytical units and extracts historical roads by inferring their existence in historical map series based on image processing and clustering techniques. We tested our method on over 300,000 road segments representing more than 50,000 km of the road network in the United States, extending across three study areas that cover 42 historical topographic map sheets dated between 1890 and 1950. We evaluated our approach by comparison to other historical datasets and against manually created reference data, achieving F-1 scores of up to 0.95, and showed that the extracted road network statistics are highly plausible over time, i.e., following general growth patterns. We demonstrated that contemporary geospatial data integrated with information extracted from historical map series open up new avenues for the quantitative analysis of long-term urbanization processes and landscape changes far beyond the era of operational remote sensing and digital cartography.
Display omitted
•Knowledge on the long-term road network evolution is limited due to a lack of data.•Our proposed method extracts past road networks from historical maps automatically.•We integrate contemporary road data, image analysis and unsupervised classification.•We test our method for 50,000 km roads on 42 historical maps in the US since 1890.•The extracted, historical urban and rural roads are highly accurate and plausible.
Case studies of the Soła, San and Dunajec rivers are used to demonstrate changes in planform geometry of the rivers draining the western and eastern parts of the flysch Polish Carpathians and those ...originating in the high-mountain Tatra massif since the second half of the nineteenth century. The number and width of low-flow channels and the length of river reaches are compared between the nineteenth-century and contemporary rivers, with analysis of other features of their planform geometry prevented by differences in the cartographic presentation of rivers on Austrian military maps and Polish topographic maps. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the rivers flowed in wide channels. The Soła supported a braided channel along its entire course, the Dunajec was mostly braided, with a single-thread channel within gorge sections, whereas for the San the braided pattern was limited to the reaches within intramontane and foreland basins. Over the twentieth century, the braided channel pattern was nearly completely eliminated and substituted by a single-thread pattern; multi-thread channel segments remained only in the upper course of the Dunajec River. Average low-flow-channel width significantly decreased, even by 66%, and this was accompanied by a reduction in the variability of low-flow channel width along the rivers. The change in planform channel geometry was accompanied by channel incision, which started earlier and has resulted in greater bed degradation in the foreland and foothill reaches of the rivers than in their mountain reaches. Twentieth-century river changes also encompassed a radical change in the facies pattern of channel sediments, accompanied by their coarsening and improved sorting and development of bed armour. Moreover, transformation of alluvial channel beds to bedrock ones took place in many reaches of Carpathian streams and rivers. The degradation of physical structure of Carpathian watercourses has resulted in adverse hydraulic and hydrological effects and a marked deterioration of habitat conditions for riverine biota.
Context
Land use and land cover (LULC) change is a major part of environmental change. Understanding its long-term causes is a major issue in landscape ecology.
Objectives
Our aim was to characterise ...LULC transitions since 1860 and assess the respective and changing effects of biophysical and socioeconomic drivers on forest, arable land and pasture in 1860, 1958 and 2010, and of biophysical, socioeconomic and distance from pre-existing forest on forest recovery for the two time intervals.
Methods
We assessed LULC transitions by superimposing 1860, 1958 and 2010 LULCs using a regular grid of 1 × 1 km points, in a French Mediterranean landscape (195,413 ha). We tested the effects of drivers using logistic regressions, and quantified pure and joint effects by deviance partitioning.
Results
Over the whole period, the three main LULCs were spatially structured according to land accessibility and soil productivity. LULC was driven more by socioeconomic than biophysical drivers in 1860, but the pattern was reversed in 2010. A widespread forest recovery mainly occurred on steeper slopes, far from houses and close to pre-existing forest, due to traditional practice abandonment. Forest recovery was better explained by biophysical than by socioeconomic drivers and was more dependent on distance from pre-existing forest between 1958 and 2010.
Conclusions
Our results showed a shift in drivers of LULC and forest recovery over the last 150 years. Contrary to temperate regions, the set-aside of agricultural practices on difficult land has strengthened the link between biophysical drivers and LULC distribution over the last 150 years.
This article focuses on defining hydromorphological features to be extracted from historical maps by means of digital map processing techniques. The hydromorphological features, evolving through ...time, can be described quantitatively by the development and application of various ecological metrics to study the spatiotemporal change of the natural and built freshwater environment. With the goal to support future revitalization efforts, this article first reviews the theory on quantifying spatiotemporal change using landscape and ecological metrics, ranging from simple shape metrics (e.g., shoreline length) to more complex hydromorphological indexes (e.g., river braiding index). Second, the hydromorphological features themselves are important to consider in terms of data quality and uncertainty as they might inherit errors due to the low-quality maps, the extraction process, or due to poor definitions used during feature extraction efforts. Errors introduced by poorly defined features can be avoided by the use of a well-structured definition system. Thus, the article concludes in a new concept categorizing hydromorphological features and the changes they can undergo. The definition framework integrates novel perspectives for defining and evaluating features from the Siegfried and old Swiss national map, including key aspects from the theory.
Digital map processing promises computational methods for the extraction of geographic features from scanned historical maps. Such workflows are error prone, with potential spatial uncertainty ...arising from the initial map production, the processing of the feature extraction, and the eventual application and use of the extracted features. This paper investigates several types of uncertainty emerging the extraction of hydrological features from historical topographic maps for the monitoring of change in ecological indicators describing river ecosystems, such as shoreline length, river sinuosity or number of river nodes and islands. Computational procedures have been developed to simulate various typical, expected sources of error. In a series of experiments investigating three different typical river types, the errors were systematically varied and increased using Monte Carlo simulation whilst studying the errors' impacts on the derived ecological indicators. The results suggest that production-oriented uncertainties emerging the initial map generalization and simplification process have bigger impacts than processing-oriented uncertainties, such as errors from manual digitizing. The results further indicate that the derivation of ecological indicators from braided rivers is more error prone than from straight or meandering rivers, and that topological indicators such as river sinuosity are more robust than indicators derived from the features' geometry.
Military history has provided significant insight into the factors determining the outcome of armed conflict through time. At the same time, it often fails to adequately assess variables unrelated to ...historical accounts per se that may contribute to military outcomes. For example, in 1066, English and Norman forces engaged in a decisive battle near Hastings, U.K. Numerous historical accounts have chronicled this event, using a combination of eyewitness and participant testimony, as well as written records, and art forms. Few, however, have paid significant attention to the role of the local landscape in shaping events. In the case of Hastings, the battlefield itself provides an example of the way in which geography can contribute to our understanding of historical events. By applying environmental sources and a regressive cartographic analysis, this study demonstrates that there is, in fact, considerable evidence to suggest how the landscape appeared back to the time of the battle. This finding is significant, insofar as it opens the door to new research on the Battle of Hastings which may shed additional light on the events that occurred there and the factors that influenced the outcome of this crucial conflict in British history. It also reveals the importance of applying new methodological approaches to traditional disciplines such as history, to deepen and expand existing analysis.
In this study, the land use around the Churches of Moldavia, UNESCO WH (World Heritage) sites, has been analysed using photo interpretation and GIS. The cartographic analysis used historical maps and ...modern orthophotos to highlight the main changes that took place over the last century in the area surrounding the sites, which has been extended to 1 km buffer. Historical maps and orthophotos of the years 1917, 2005, and 2016 have been processed to identify the present and historical changes in one of the most well-known historical areas of Eastern Europe. Monuments have a significant universal, national, and local value, contributing to the touristic development of the area. The most important processes that can affect the integrity of the monuments are the deforestations and the anthropogenic environmental changes. Significant changes took place around Probota, Humor, Patrauti and Arbore churches, while Sucevita, Voronet and Moldovita churches still preserve the natural landscape specific to the Bukovina historical area; Suceava church is part of a strongly urbanised landscape.
•Churches of Moldavia, Bukovina are listed in the UNESCO World Heritage List.•Land use dynamics by means of remote sensing and GIS techniques were undertaken around the eight Churches of Moldavia.•A diachronic analysis was performed over a timespan of approximately 100 years (1917–2016).•Natural processes and anthropic interventions have a significant role in the land use category changes.
This article represents an attempt to establish a fruitful dialogue among the field of border studies, history education, sociocultural psychology, and the history of cartography. Seminal studies on ...borders have asserted that the historical maps included in textbooks are basically an imagined representation. This paper will consider the extent to which cultural and educational origins and uses of these maps, particularly in school settings, act as a support to historical essentialist views. Via the example of history education in Argentina, we carried out an empirical and theoretical examination of the processes of cultural production and consumption of historical maps and their relationship to historical master narratives. Results show that most laypeople largely think of national borders as possessing an essential and immutable character. We consider that closer study, from a sociocultural perspective, of the relationship between master narratives and historical maps may add an enriching element to the existing body of work produced by border studies.
The conservation and renewal of old cities has become one of the focuses of urban planning worldwide. It is crucial for the sustainable development of old cities to expound the growth process of the ...shape and texture and internal structure of old cities under different political systems from the perspective of spatial configuration. Based on historical maps and Landsat data, using the space syntax theory and GIS platform, this paper studies the urban growth process of the old city of Nanjing for about 170 years since the mid-Qing Dynasty. A finding in this study is that the old city of Nanjing is more capable of north–south growth than east–west growth. During the feudal era from 1850 to 1912, the urban center, population and built-up area of the old city of Nanjing were concentrated in the south of the city. After the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. The built-up area and NAIN core of the old city began to move northward. During the socialist era after 1949, urban growth sped up dramatically. The old city's NAIN core move northward to Xinjiekou-Gulou. This study proves the possibility of using historical maps and Landsat data to study urban growth and builds a framework for the study of the growth of traditional urban spatial forms in history, providing a theoretical reference for the conservation and revitalization of the old city of Nanjing and a method for the study of the spatial forms of other old cities.
The investigation of historical maps is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of landscape changes. In this study, we propose Web GIS tools as a way to compare historical maps efficiently for ...knowledge production. A key impetus of this article is to contribute to the ongoing efforts to broaden the appeal of ‘mixed‐methods research’ by bridging the epistemological and methodological gaps between GIS and qualitative methodologies in knowledge production. This article proposes a new visualization method for historical landscape change analysis by comparing multiple maps simultaneously with the mash‐up of Web GIS. Based on the analysis of exterior facts represented on the maps, four developmental footprints were investigated, namely, surviving place identity, disappeared place identity replaced by new identity, waning place identity overlapped with new identity, and waning identity by disconnected spatial relationships. To this end, the study argues that Web GIS applications have more potential in spatial knowledge production than traditional desktop GIS.
PDF
