Broad scale forest cover reconstruction from historical topographic maps

Kaim, Dominik; Kozak, Jacek; Kolecka, Natalia; Ziółkowska, Elżbieta; Ostafin, Krzysztof; Ostapowicz, Katarzyna; Gimmi, Urs; Munteanu, Catalina; Radeloff, Volker C.

doi:10.1016/j.apgeog.2015.12.003

Cited by 84 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…In Poland, access to historical maps is limited [34], and therefore the usefulness of such historical maps in ecological studies is rather restricted [21,[35][36][37]. The historical analysis has concentrated mostly on the Carpathian region [38][39][40][41]. As a consequence, there is a lack of available data regarding ancient forest distribution, drivers of land use/land cover changes, as well as the historical structure of the landscape.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in forest cover in Sudety Mountains during the last 250 years: patterns, drivers, and landscape-scale implications for nature conservation

et al. 2018

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Historical ecology gives a reference point to explain the contemporary state of particular ecosystems as well as entire landscapes. In this study, we examined the quantitative changes in forest cover in the central part of the Sudety Massif (area ca. 1,120 km 2 ) during the last 250 years. The information regarding forest patch distribution and its changes was derived by comparison of maps from 1747 and the 1970s drawn at scales of 1:33,000 and 1:25,000, respectively. To examine the effect of environmental variables (topography and soil conditions) and human population density on forest patch distribution and its changes (afforestation, deforestation), a set of 100 circular plots with a diameter of 1 km was established. The influence of explanatory variables was examined using regression tree methods. Changes at the level of the entire landscape were tested using a set of 25 landscape windows (5 × 5 km each). We found that the overall forest cover increased to 36.4% in the twentieth century from 30.4% in the middle of the eighteenth century. The ancient forests constituted 59% of the total forest area existing more recently. The forests in the eighteenth century occurred mostly on steep slopes, deep valley bottoms, and summits. The land relief explains more than half of the total variation in forest distribution (R 2 = 0.56). The effects of soil type and human population density were negligible. The contemporary forest pattern results from both land relief and the historical pattern of human population density in the middle of the eighteenth century (R 2 = 0.64), while the effect of soil type was negligible. The pattern of deforestation (R 2 = 0.53) and afforestation (R 2 = 0.36) results from both land relief as well as recent and nineteenth-century human population density. About 83% of the recent forest area is in physical contact with patches of the ancient forest, which provides an optimistic outlook for the migration of ancient forest species into new areas. Furthermore, changes in landscape structure reveal increased connectivity among forest patches, with potential benefits for the migration of forest species with long-range dispersal.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in forest cover in Sudety Mountains during the last 250 years: patterns, drivers, and landscape-scale implications for nature conservation

et al. 2018

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“…; Kaim et al. ). However, if one uses a variety of historical sources (military and cadaster maps, travel diaries, botanical descriptions, archival aerial, and satellite imagery), long‐term changes can be reconstructed in detail (Gimmi et al.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…; Kaim et al. ). We argue that longer‐term historical reconstructions could effectively increase the applicability of recent habitat trend data (e.g., EC and the Natura 2000 habitat‐area‐change data reported every 6 years by all member states) and could contribute to the development of more habitat‐specific nature conservation measures.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Use of long‐term data to evaluate loss and endangerment status of Natura 2000 habitats and effects of protected areas

Biró

Bölöni

Molnár

2018

Conservation Biology

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Habitat loss is a key driver of biodiversity loss. However, hardly any long-term time series analyses of habitat loss are available above the local scale for finer-level habitat categories. We analysed, from a long-term perspective, the habitat specificity of habitat-area loss, the change in trends in habitat loss since 1989 (dissolution of the communist state), and the impact of protected areas on habitat loss in Hungary. We studied 20 seminatural habitat types in 5000 randomly selected localities over 7 periods from 1783 to 2013 based on historical maps, archival and recent aerial photos and satellite imagery, botanical descriptions, and field data. We developed a method for estimating habitat types based on information transfer between historical sources (i.e., information from a source was used to interpret or enrich information from another source). Trends in habitat loss over time were habitat specific. We identified 7 types of habitat loss over time regarding functional form: linear, exponential, linear and exponential, delayed, minimum, maximum, and disappearance. Most habitats had continuous loss from period to period. After 1986 the average annual rates of habitat loss increased, but the trend reversed after 2002. Nature conservation measures significantly affected habitat loss; net loss was halted, albeit only inside protected areas. When calculating the degree of endangerment based on short-term data (52 years), we classified only 1 habitat as critically endangered, but based on long-term data (230 years), this increased to 7 (including habitat that no longer existed). Hungary will probably reach the global Convention on Biological Diversity Target 5 but will probably not achieve the EU Biodiversity Strategy target of halting habitat loss by 2020. Long-term trend data were highly useful when we examined recent habitat-loss data in a wider context. Our method could be applied effectively in other countries to augment shorter-term data sets on trends in habitat area.

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“…Although large collections of scanned and georeferenced historical maps of several countries are available via Internet (e.g. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps, http://igrek.amzp.pl, http://www.mapywig.org, http://publicdomain.nypl.org, http://www.mapire.eu) the methods of extracting this information, to use in broad scale spatial analysis are still missing (Kaim et al ., ). Most frequently, maps are interpreted visually and manually vectorized, even when the final data is required in a raster format.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Forest cover mask from historical topographic maps based on image processing

Ostafin

Iwanowski

Kozak

et al. 2017

Geoscience Data Journal

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Research carried out within the FORECOM project (Forest cover changes in mountainous regions -drivers, trajectories and implications, PSRP-008/2010), supported by a grant from Switzerland through the Swiss contribution to the enlarged European Union.This study aimed to obtain accurate binary forest masks which might be directly used in analysis of land cover changes over large areas. A sequence of image processing operations was conceived, parameterized and tested using various topographic maps from mountain areas in Poland and Switzerland. First, the input maps were filtered and binarized by thresholding in Hue-SaturationValue colour space. The second step consisted of a set of morphological image analysis procedures leading to final forest masks. The forest masks were then assessed and compared to manual forest boundary vectorization. The Polish topographical map published in the 1930s showed low accuracy which could be attributed to methods of cartographic presentation used and degradation of original colour prints. For maps published in the 1970s, the automated forest extraction performed very well, with accuracy exceeding 97%, comparable to accuracies of manual vectorization of the same maps performed by nontrained operators. With this method, we obtained a forest cover mask for the entire area of the Polish Carpathians, easily readable in any Geographic Information System software.

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Broad scale forest cover reconstruction from historical topographic maps

Cited by 84 publications

References 58 publications

Changes in forest cover in Sudety Mountains during the last 250 years: patterns, drivers, and landscape-scale implications for nature conservation

Changes in forest cover in Sudety Mountains during the last 250 years: patterns, drivers, and landscape-scale implications for nature conservation

Use of long‐term data to evaluate loss and endangerment status of Natura 2000 habitats and effects of protected areas

Forest cover mask from historical topographic maps based on image processing

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