Combining Remote-Sensing-Derived Data and Historical Maps for Long-Term Back-Casting of Urban Extents

Abstract

Spatially explicit, fine-grained datasets describing historical urban extents are rarely available prior to the era of operational remote sensing. However, such data are necessary to better understand long-term urbanization and land development processes and for the assessment of coupled nature–human systems (e.g., the dynamics of the wildland–urban interface). Herein, we propose a framework that jointly uses remote-sensing-derived human settlement data (i.e., the Global Human Settlement Layer, GHSL) and scanned, georeferenced historical maps to automatically generate historical urban extents for the early 20th century. By applying unsupervised color space segmentation to the historical maps, spatially constrained to the urban extents derived from the GHSL, our approach generates historical settlement extents for seamless integration with the multi-temporal GHSL. We apply our method to study areas in countries across four continents, and evaluate our approach against historical building density estimates from the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the US (HISDAC-US), and against urban area estimates from the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE). Our results achieve Area-under-the-Curve values >0.9 when comparing to HISDAC-US and are largely in agreement with model-based urban areas from the HYDE database, demonstrating that the integration of remote-sensing-derived observations and historical cartographic data sources opens up new, promising avenues for assessing urbanization and long-term land cover change in countries where historical maps are available.

Reconstruction of Residential Land Cover and Spatial Analysis of Population in Bursa Region (Turkey) in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

“…Regarding the Bursa region, there is hardly any land cover/use map before the 1990s, and due to existence of limited time series spatial maps, we were not able to project land cover/use changes backward [49,89]. Neither we were able to simulate historical land uses through the application of a historical land use reconstruction model [53,90,91]. Despite the limitations of data and methodological framework, the reconstructed residential land cover/use map in the current study can serve as an input in future studies that aim to analyse long term land use changes in the Bursa region.…”

How historical maps support geographical names study in Agam Regency, Indonesia

“…The utilization of historical maps has significantly expanded through their combination with remote sensing data. This integration has enabled studies on coastline changes 10 , investigation of long-term urban amplitude changes 11 , and the merging of historic maps with LiDAR data for land type detection 12 . More specific to geographical names, names extracted from historical maps have been widely used to undertake spatial analysis 13,4 and they can even be used to recreate historical rivers in Hubei, China 14 .…”

Building spatio-temporal knowledge graphs from vectorized topographic historical maps

“…Historical map archives contain valuable geographic information on both natural and human-made features across time and space [10,32] and are increasingly available in systematically acquired digital data formats [30,31]. The spatio-temporal data extracted from these documents are important since they can convey when, where and what…”