Over 150 Years of Change: Object-Oriented Analysis of Historical Land Cover in the Main River Catchment, Bavaria/Germany

Yrneh Ulloa-Torrealba,Martin Wegmann,Reinhold Stahlmann,Thomas Koellner

doi:10.3390/rs12244048

Yrneh Ulloa-Torrealba, Martin Wegmann + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12244048

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Abstract

The monitoring of land cover and land use change is critical for assessing the provision of ecosystem services. One of the sources for long-term land cover change quantification is through the classification of historical and/or current maps. Little research has been done on historical maps using Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA). This study applied an object-based classification using eCognition tool for analyzing the land cover based on historical maps in the Main river catchment, Upper Franconia, Germany. This allowed land use change analysis between the 1850s and 2015, a time span which covers the phase of industrialization of landscapes in central Europe. The results show a strong increase in urban area by 2600%, a severe loss of cropland (−24%), a moderate reduction in meadows (−4%), and a small gain in forests (+4%). The method proved useful for the application on historical maps due to the ability of the software to create semantic objects. The confusion matrix shows an overall accuracy of 82% for the automatic classification compared to manual reclassification considering all 17 sample tiles. The minimum overall accuracy was 65% for historical maps of poor quality and the maximum was 91% for very high-quality ones. Although accuracy is between high and moderate, coarse land cover patterns in the past and trends in land cover change can be analyzed. We conclude that such long-term analysis of land cover is a prerequisite for quantifying long-term changes in ecosystem services.

Highlights

In Europe, historical reconstructions of the changes in the land over the last 300 hundred years provide information of a period when major transformations occurred due to agriculture, grazing activities, and the growth of urban settlements [1,2]
Long time scale land use and land cover change analyses can be performed with the use of historical maps, which have been widely done in Central Europe [6,7]
Our work showed that automatic classification of historical maps with mixed quality is possible, but accuracy is between high and moderate depending on the input quality of the maps

Summary

Introduction

In Europe, historical reconstructions of the changes in the land over the last 300 hundred years provide information of a period when major transformations occurred due to agriculture, grazing activities, and the growth of urban settlements [1,2]. In Germany, analyses of land use and land cover change include historical information that dates back approximately 200 years, in the region of Upper Franconia [4,12], Bavarian Forest [13], Swabian Jura [11], and, more recently, Leipzig [10]. The extraction of relevant information from historical maps requires that the different features are quantifiable. For this purpose, historical maps have to be georeferenced, and features have to be digitized and categorized in the corresponding land use and land cover classes [9]

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