Reconstructing nineteenth century landscapes from historical maps—the Survey of Western Palestine as a case study

Schaffer, Gad; Levin, Noam

doi:10.1080/01426397.2015.1078454

Cited by 20 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…The first attempts to use GIS and cartographic material of the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods were made only at the beginning of the 21st century by Frumin (2004) for studying Russian navy mapping activity, and also by Saidel and Christopherson (2005) to evaluate the survey conducted by Wooley and Lawrence at Elusa during the early 20th century. In general, maps were the main cartographic material being analyzed for detecting landscape changes (Levin, 2006; Levin, Elron, & Gasith, 2009; Levin, Kark, & Galilee, 2010; Schaffer & Levin, 2014, 2016; Schaffer, Peer, & Levin, 2016; Zohar, 2019), but gradually GIScience approaches have expanded and included the examination of other visuals such as paintings (Davie & Frumin, 2007; Zohar, Rubin, & Salamon, 2015), old photographs (Zohar, Rubin, & Salamon, 2014), and air photographs (Zohar, 2017).…”

Section: Giscience and The Study Of Palestinementioning

confidence: 99%

Advancing the historical geography of late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine using GIScience: A review

Zohar

2020

Transactions in GIS

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Late Ottoman Empire and Mandate Palestine are two important periods preceding independent Israel, characterized by increased attention to Palestine along with modernization processes and substantial landscape changes. Significant increase is also noted in survey and mapping, resulting in a wealth of visual sources. However, while textual sources were used intensively in various studies, the latter were analyzed to a much lesser extent. A major discipline based on the study of visual sources is historical geography. However, lately it seems that historical geography worldwide seeks for new approaches while struggling to retain dominancy in an environment becoming more computerized and technological. In this article I review the opportunities, pitfalls, and challenges of incorporating GIScience into the historical geography of late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Accordingly, it is suggested that a proper integration will contribute a substantial theoretical and methodological novelty while boosting the discipline of historical geography as well as other social sciences and humanities disciplines.

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Section: Giscience and The Study Of Palestinementioning

confidence: 99%

Advancing the historical geography of late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine using GIScience: A review

Zohar

2020

Transactions in GIS

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“…However, because photography was not available prior to the mid-19th century [3], researchers must rely on alternative visual sources and cartographic material. However, while these sources provide valuable information, they can be incomplete, inaccurate, and subjective, necessitating careful verification [4,5]. Additionally, many of these sources lack geo-referencing to a modern coordinate reference system (CRS), making it challenging to accurately position the depicted features within a spatial context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geo-Referencing and Analysis of Entities Extracted from Old Drawings and Photos Using Computer Vision and Deep Learning Algorithms

David,

Zohar,

Shimshoni

2023

IJGI

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This study offers a quantitative solution that automates the creation of a historical timeline starting with old drawings from the beginning of the 18th century and ending with present-day photographs of the Old City of Jerusalem. This is performed using GIScience approaches, computer vision, and deep learning. The motivation to select the Old City of Jerusalem is the substantial availability of old archival drawings and photographs, owing to the area’s significance throughout the years. This task is challenging, as drawings, old photographs, and new photographs exhibit distinct characteristics. Our method encompasses several key components for the analyses: a 2D location recommendation engine, which detects an approximate location in the image of 3D landmarks; 2D landmarks to 3D conversion; and 2D polygonal areas to 3D GIS polylines conversion. This is applied to the segmentation of built areas. To achieve more accurate results, Meta’s Segment Anything model was utilized, which eliminates the need for extensive data preparation, training, and validation, thus optimizing the process. Using such techniques enabled us to examine the landscape development throughout the last three centuries and gain deeper insights concerning the evolution of prominent landmarks and features such as built area over time.

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“…Reconstructions of past landscapes from explicitly spatial historical sources, such as historical land cover maps, cadasters or even charcoal data, have started appearing in the literature [7][8][9]. However, spatially explicit material is not universally available.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-Term Landscape Dynamics to Assess Land Degradation Hypotheses—An Exploratory Study of Evidence from Travelers’ Narrations

et al. 2022

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The present study aims to provide a method for extending the scope of empirical landscape studies into the more distant past and to use it to contribute to the discourse on land degradation in the Mediterranean area. In many areas of the world, the lack of spatially explicit sources, such as historical land cover maps and cadasters, is an obstacle to extending the study of landscape dynamics in the past. Information mined from travelers’ texts can be used to overcome it. Landscape descriptions retrieved from W.M. Leake’s narration of his travels in Peloponnese, Greece, in 1805 and 1806, were georeferenced and used to test for the occurrence of land degradation by comparing historical to current landscapes. A widespread transition of natural vegetation to agricultural areas was found mostly in low altitudes. Limited rewilding occurred on steeper slopes. About a third of the historical Greek fir forests were degraded to open stands. A total of 40% of the locations covered by deciduous oak forests were converted to agricultural areas; most of the rest of these locations were converted to vegetation types characteristic of lower precipitation and soil fertility. Long-term dynamics can be efficiently assessed using narrations as a source of information. The comparison of early 19th century descriptions with the current condition suggests that limited land degradation did take place in the previous centuries in the study area.

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Reconstructing nineteenth century landscapes from historical maps—the Survey of Western Palestine as a case study

Cited by 20 publications

References 34 publications

Advancing the historical geography of late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine using GIScience: A review

Advancing the historical geography of late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine using GIScience: A review

Geo-Referencing and Analysis of Entities Extracted from Old Drawings and Photos Using Computer Vision and Deep Learning Algorithms

Long-Term Landscape Dynamics to Assess Land Degradation Hypotheses—An Exploratory Study of Evidence from Travelers’ Narrations

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