150 years’ land use change and landscape dynamics digitized from historical paper map and aerial photos over Chancellorsville

<p dir="ltr"> 150 years’ land use change and landscape dynamics digitized from historical paper map and aerial photos over Chancellorsville</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">Tracking Earth’s past can help move landscape sustainability from hindsight to foresight, but historical land-use data are often scarce. To help fill this gap, we combined an 1867 paper-based Civil War–era map with modern aerial photos to reconstruct fine-scale land-use change near Chancellorsville, Virginia (USA) from 1867 to 2014, and evaluated object-based image analysis and Random Forest (RF) for processing and classification.</p><p dir="ltr">Automated classification of the scanned 1867 map was difficult, though object-based segmentation aided manual digitization. For aerial imagery, object-based classification outperformed pixel-based methods when segmentation was properly tuned. RF rankings indicated spectral features were far more informative than shape/geometry for land-cover discrimination. Over 147 years, 32% of the area changed land type: settlement and roads expanded by 1850% and 691%, respectively, while woodland declined by 19%, increasing fragmentation and affecting hydrology and river morphology. These findings underscore the value of old maps for land-use and global change research and the need to preserve and georeference today’s non-traditional data (e.g., photos, videos, citizen science) as future baselines.</p>