GIS Measurement of Nobility's Lands in the Late 18th - First Half of the 19th Centuries

Abstract

The article explores the way GIS technologies can be used to study historical dynamics of environmental processes in an agrarian society. It addresses several landowner estates in Tambovskaya Guberniya in the late 18th — first half of the 19th centuries when the vast steppe lands in the region were finally reclaimed. Since written documents have no clear evidence of the dynamics of sizes of various estate lands understudy, cartographic materials were the primary source for calculating this dynamics. Although there are some deviations from geographic coordinates in maps of the General Land Survey and Mende Land Survey, GIS technologies made it possible to determine (with a minimal error margin) changes in the area of the estates in general and residential, arable, meadow, forest and erosion lands in particular. Promising results of geoenvironmental calculations provided a solid foundation for a historical case study of environmental processes in landowner estates of the forest-steppe belt of Russia. The estates understudy were expanding due to the growth of settlements and arable lands at the expense of meadows and steppes and were characterized by a lack of forest exploitation. A technique introduced can be of value when studying the history of landowner and other estates which can boast preserved plans without distinct geographical references.