Discovering extinct water bodies in the landscape of Central Europe using toponymic GIS

Abstract

Due to global climate change and anthropogenic pressures on the landscape, one of the current geographical problems is retention of water in agricultural landscapes. One possibility to tackle this issue is the construction of artificial water bodies, which has historical traditions in the form of fishponds in Central European landscapes. Unfortunately, many such water bodies were transformed into arable lands during the 18th and 19th centuries. In this study, the identification and spatial distribution of these extinct water bodies is subject to examination, using place names in a GIS environment. Some 375 place names were selected from the official database of place names in the Czech Republic. This set of names was compared to current maps, as well as to old maps from the Habsburg monarchy from 1783–1880 (1st, 2nd and 3rd Military Survey). The map resources were used to find out if a place name was related to an extinct fishpond, and in which period the pond ceased to exist. Using spatial statistics, the existence of areas with a high concentration of place names referring to extinct ponds is demonstrated. It has also been established that areas linked to fishpond extinction in the same period now face more frequent droughts. Thus, the set of place names can be used to identify not only extinct water bodies, but also to serve as being potentially useful in other analyses using GIS, as well as in the public sphere (reclamation).

Relics and transformation of former ponds in the urban environment of the historical region of Bohemia (Czech Republic)

“…These are mainly as street or field names. Moreover, many of these streets copy the shape of the original pond dam (Figure 5(a)) thus connecting the imaginary terrain as well as the written reference to this former historical landscape element (Frajer & Fiedor, 2018). A special case is again registered in the city of Pardubice, which lost the municipality of Spojil in 1991 when the village became independent and now forms an enclave in the city of Pardubice.…”

“…), and interference in the georelief (digging, relocation and infilling of riverbeds, construction of dams, etc.) or intangible ones, such as collective memory and identity, local stories, and place names (Frajer & Fiedor, 2018). These traces may disappear, be kept, or transformed in connection with urban development and level of society, thus taking part in the creation of a notional urban palimpsest (Bartolini, 2014).…”

Josephian cadastre as a source of geographic information on historical landscapes

“…Změny v zastoupení ploch jednotlivých tříd využití krajiny mezi JK a SK ve zkoumaném území lze interpretovat jako potvrzení obecného trendu přelomu 18. a 19. století. Jedná se o dobu rozsáhlého vysoušení rybníků (Frajer, Fiedor 2018) a přechodu na nový způsob intenzivního zemědělského hospodaření. V Šebestěnicích bylo mezi lety 1795 a 1838 vysušeno šest rybníků o celkové ploše 7,52 ha (dle JK).…”

Strengths of Exaggerated Tsunami-Originated Placenames: Disaster Subculture in Sanriku Coast, Japan

“…Sousa et al use placenames in a series of historic maps since the 17th century to observe the land use changes [8], and the decrease in wetlands associated with the climate change [9]. Frajer and Feidor use a similar approach in identifying transformations of water bodies through modernization [10].…”

“…Other examples include the use of street names as indicators to local social and cultural characteristics [21], to use field names for management and planning of landscapes [22], and to use toponym databases to reveal different conceptualization of landscapes across different groups and cultures [23]. Uncertainties and ambiguities present in the placename information can be costly to rectify, as the very use of placename information is often because there is no other source, but is done through fieldwork [22,24] and cross-referencing to other available documents [5,9,10]. If the number of placenames for the analysis is large, the problem may be solved by applying statistical analyses [14,15].…”