Paper and pixels: historic maps as a multifaceted resource

AbstractHistoric gardens and their related landscapes are often experienced only for their social, aesthetic, and environmental resources, yet their cultural, architectural, and perceptive significance is often ignored. The paper demonstrates how historic and educational values of historic gardens and related landscapes can be revealed by combining historic maps, reading perspective cones, and also applying advanced digital and educational methods and techniques. Historical maps, especially military and cadastral maps, associated with historical iconography, can provide us with a lot of information to study historical gardens and also to define conservation and valorization plans that are related to the history of the site: geomatics tools to georeference and co-relate metric and non-metric historical maps provide growing useful outputs, that can be deployed through the use of Virtual Hubs, boosting the availability of content and the accessibility of open data for policy makers, experts, and non-expert members. Moreover, they can also support heritage education programs providing the opportunity to allow to understand the wealth of sites now simplified, in their system, with different functions and with a transformed context. The study of historic gardens involves the analysis of the landscape in its dynamism and complexity, defines tools that make users more aware of the richness of our heritage.

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Unravelling the evolution of Zmuttgletscher and its debris cover since the end of the Little Ice Age

The Cryosphere ◽

10.5194/tc-13-1889-2019 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 13 (7) ◽

pp. 1889-1909 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Nico Mölg ◽

Tobias Bolch ◽

Andrea Walter ◽

Andreas Vieli

Keyword(s):

Mass Balance ◽

Ice Age ◽

Aerial Photographs ◽

Dynamic Interactions ◽

Glacier Surface ◽

Ablation Area ◽

Debris Cover ◽

Historic Maps ◽

Length And Area ◽

Flow Velocities

Abstract. Debris-covered glaciers generally exhibit large, gently sloping, slow-flowing tongues. At present, many of these glaciers show high thinning rates despite thick debris cover. Due to the lack of observations, most existing studies have neglected the dynamic interactions between debris cover and glacier evolution over longer time periods. The main aim of this study is to reveal such interactions by reconstructing changes of debris cover, glacier geometry, flow velocities, and surface features of Zmuttgletscher (Switzerland), based on historic maps, satellite images, aerial photographs, and field observations. We show that debris cover extent has increased from ∼13 % to ∼32 % of the total glacier surface since 1859 and that in 2017 the debris is sufficiently thick to reduce ablation compared to bare ice over much of the ablation area. Despite the debris cover, the glacier-wide mass balance of Zmuttgletscher is comparable to that of debris-free glaciers located in similar settings, whereas changes in length and area have been small and delayed by comparison. Increased ice mass input in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in a temporary velocity increase, which led to a local decrease in debris cover extent, a lowering of the upper boundary of the ice-cliff zone, and a strong reduction in ice-cliff area, indicating a dynamic link between flow velocities, debris cover, and surface morphology. Since 2005, the lowermost 1.5 km of the glacier has been quasi-stagnant, despite a slight increase in the surface slope of the glacier tongue. We conclude that the long-term glacier-wide mass balance is mainly governed by climate. The debris cover governs the spatial pattern of elevation change without changing its glacier-wide magnitude, which we explain by the extended ablation area and the enhanced thinning in regions with thin debris further up-glacier and in areas with abundant meltwater channels and ice cliffs. At the same time rising temperatures lead to increasing debris cover and decreasing ice flux, thereby attenuating length and area losses.

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Historic Redlining and Asthma Exacerbations Across Eight Cities of California: A Foray into How Historic Maps Are Associated with Asthma Risk

10.1164/ajrccm-conference.2019.199.1_meetingabstracts.a7054 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

A. Nardone ◽

N. Thakur ◽

J.R. Balmes

Keyword(s):

Asthma Risk ◽

Asthma Exacerbations ◽

Historic Maps

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Mapping Archaeology While Mapping an Empire: Using Historical Maps to Reconstruct Ancient Settlement Landscapes in Modern India and Pakistan

Geosciences ◽

10.3390/geosciences9010011 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 11 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Cameron Petrie ◽

Hector Orengo ◽

Adam Green ◽

Joanna Walker ◽

Arnau Garcia ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Landscape Archaeology ◽

Research Programme ◽

Aerial Photographs ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Historical Maps ◽

Archaeological Prospection ◽

Mapping Resource ◽

Historic Maps ◽

Map Series ◽

Irrigation Agriculture

A range of data sources are now used to support the process of archaeological prospection, including remote sensed imagery, spy satellite photographs and aerial photographs. This paper advocates the value and importance of a hitherto under-utilised historical mapping resource—the Survey of India 1” to 1-mile map series, which was based on surveys started in the mid–late nineteenth century, and published progressively from the early twentieth century AD. These maps present a systematic documentation of the topography of the British dominions in the South Asian Subcontinent. Incidentally, they also documented the locations, the height and area of thousands of elevated mounds that were visible in the landscape at the time that the surveys were carried out, but have typically since been either damaged or destroyed by the expansion of irrigation agriculture and urbanism. Subsequent reanalysis has revealed that many of these mounds were actually the remains of ancient settlements. The digitisation and analysis of these historic maps thus creates a unique opportunity for gaining insight into the landscape archaeology of South Asia. This paper reviews the context within which these historical maps were created, presents a method for georeferencing them, and reviews the symbology that was used to represent elevated mound features that have the potential to be archaeological sites. This paper should be read in conjunction with the paper by Arnau Garcia et al. in the same issue of Geosciences, which implements a research programme combining historical maps and a range of remote sensing approaches to reconstruct historical landscape dynamics in the Indus River Basin.

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