Abstract
Since 1996, Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) researchers have been exploring change in Canada's mountain environments through the use of systematic repeat photography. With access to upwards of 120,000 systematic glass plate negatives from Canada's mountain west, the MLP field teams seek to stand where historic surveyors stood and accurately reshoot these images. The resulting image pairs are analyzed, catalogued, and made available for further research into landscape changes. In this article we suggest that repeat photography would fit well within the Future Earth research agenda. We go on to introduce the Image Analysis Toolkit (IAT), which provides interactive comparative image visualization and analytics for a wide variety of ecological, geological, fluvial, and human phenomena. The toolkit is based on insights from recent research on repeat photography and features the following: user-controlled ability to compare, overlay, classify, scale, fade, draw, and annotate images; production of comparative stat...
Highlights
In this article we draw on 20 years of experience rephotographing historic Canadian mountain images for the Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) to show that repeat photography can be a critical interdisciplinary method for observing and attributing change in mountain environments
Using examples from our own rephotographic work in the mountains of western Canada, we introduce the Image Analysis Toolkit (IAT), software designed by MLP to assist with visualizing, annotating, and quantitatively describing changes and similarities between photographs
Basic metadata are available for each pair, as is at least one visualization technique: a wiping vertical slider that allows the user to hide/reveal the modern aligned image underlying the historic one. Watching people use this visualization technique to engage with the images, MLP researchers began asking these questions: ‘‘What tools do mountain study researchers and community practitioners from diverse disciplines need to access, explore, and analyze image pairs? Can images outside the Mountain Legacy collection be explored?’’ The IAT is the response, and, as more mountain studies practitioners engage with the tool, it continues to develop
Summary
Since 1996, Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) researchers have been exploring change in Canada’s mountain environments through the use of systematic repeat photography. The toolkit is based on insights from recent research on repeat photography and features the following: user-controlled ability to compare, overlay, classify, scale, fade, draw, and annotate images; production of comparative statistics on user-defined categories (eg percentage of ice cover change in each image pair); and different ways to visualize change in the image pairs. All images and software are under Creative Commons copyright and are open access for noncommercial use via the Mountain Legacy Explorer website. The IAT is at the beginning of its software life cycle and will continue to develop features required by those who use repeat photography to discover change in mountain environments
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