Abstract
Landscapes and human settlements evolve over long periods of time. Land change, as one of the drivers of the ecological crisis in the Anthropocene, therefore, needs to be studied with a long-term perspective. Over the past decades, a substantial body of research has accumulated in the field of land change science. The quantitative geospatial analysis of land change, however, still faces many challenges; be that methodological or data accessibility related. This editorial introduces several scientific contributions to an open-access Special Issue on historical settlement and landscape analysis. The featured articles cover all phases of the analysis process in this field: from the exploration and geocoding of data sources and the acquisition and processing of data to the adequate visualization and application of the retrieved historical geoinformation for knowledge generation. The data used in this research include archival maps, cadastral and master plans, crowdsourced data, airborne LiDAR and satellite-based data products. From a geographical perspective, the issue covers urban and rural regions in Central Europe and North America as well as regions subject to highly dynamic urbanization in East Asia. In the view of global environmental challenges, both the need for long-term studies on land change within Earth system research and the current advancement in AI methods for the retrieval, processing and integration of historical geoinformation will further fuel this field of research.
Highlights
Settlements and anthropogenic changes to landscapes can be perceived as visible traces of human activities on the land surface
There are persistent challenges that prevent the research community from developing and implementing quantitative geospatial approaches. These challenges range from identifying effective ways to process and convert analogous, non-geocoded and heterogeneous data sources to the methodological issues in automated information extraction for large-scale applications to the interpretation of often fuzzy and low-quality datasets. Some of these challenges and unresolved issues related to the geospatial analysis of historical settlements and landscapes are addressed in an openaccess Special Issue, which is introduced by this editorial
In thematic sessions, invited contributions focused on the theoretical foundations of land change science, ontologies, reviews of the field, methodical issues including algorithms for data acquisition for multi-temporal and multi-scale data integration, for uncertainty estimation in spatiotemporal modeling as well as applicationoriented issues comprising ecosystems services, urban sprawl, historical demography, digital humanities and visualization across different spatial and temporal scales
Summary
Settlements and anthropogenic changes to landscapes can be perceived as visible traces of human activities on the land surface. There are persistent challenges that prevent the research community from developing and implementing quantitative geospatial approaches These challenges range from identifying effective ways to process and convert analogous, non-geocoded and heterogeneous data sources to the methodological issues in automated information extraction for large-scale applications to the interpretation of often fuzzy and low-quality datasets. Some of these challenges and unresolved issues related to the geospatial analysis of historical settlements and landscapes are addressed in an openaccess Special Issue, which is introduced by this editorial. We introduce and comment on the included contributions to this exciting field of study and provide some context related to the analytical foundations underlying this research, the challenges arising from it and future directions
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