Overcoming the Boundaries of History: Extracting Land Use and Land Cover Features from Archival Maps of Northern Burkina Faso Using GIS Software

Abstract

Archival maps provide a valuable way to explore historical environmental data collected before the use of satellite imagery. Archival maps in their physical form cannot readily be used, however, beyond what the original cartographer intended. In this project, we describe a manual method to bring scanned archival maps into digital form using common tools in a geographic information systems (GIS) software platform. We rely on the important context of West Africa where a generation of geographers as part of the Terroir school worked with local agrarian communities to understand land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics. Specifically, we analyze archival maps of the Yatenga Province in Burkina Faso originally created by Jean-Yves Marchal, who used aerial photography from 1952 and 1973. This article describes the image processing steps to extract LULC data from scanned archival images using the graphical user interface of popular GIS tools. We compare our results to Marchal’s original maps and provide an alternative analysis of LULC change in the region using the newly extracted LULC data.