Abstract
Repeat photography is a useful tool for evaluating historical landscape change. The objective of this study was to use ground-based repeat photography to quantify landscape vegetation changes during the period of 1880–2008 and to evaluate methods employed in repeat photography. The historical photographs included 237 landscape photographs taken in 1880 in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Fifty-five photographs were successfully relocated, and the photograph pairs were analyzed for changes in cover classes and changes by topographical position. From 1880 to 2008, forest land was the most stable cover type (98% of forested land in 1880 remained forested in 2008). Some of the main patterns of land conversion during this time period were (1) agricultural land converted to forest (19%), (2) residential and commercial land converted to forest (18%), and (3) transportation systems converted to forest or agricultural land (57%). When combined with other historical land use methods, repeat photography can yield a detailed reconstruction of the historical profile of an area; however, if the original locations of the photographs are unknown, repeat photography is a very time-intensive technique.
Highlights
Repeat ground-based photography enables the comparison and interpretation of changes between historical and current landscape patterns
The trend of land conversion to FOR was a pattern seen in other cover types, most notably rock outcrops (ROC) (54% converted to FOR), distant mountain (DMT) (40%), residential or commercial (RES) (18%), and transportation systems (TRN) (27%)
TRN represents a small portion of the overall landscape (4%), it experienced substantial transitions in both the creation of new transportation systems on lands formerly used for RES (11%) and the conversion of former transportation systems to AGR (30%) and FOR (27%)
Summary
Repeat ground-based photography enables the comparison and interpretation of changes between historical and current landscape patterns. Repeat photography has been used to quantify vegetation shifts caused by climate change and reconstruct trends in landscape vegetation change, such as tree encroachment, land conversion, field abandonment, or forest fragmentation (Veblen and Lorenz 1988; Skovlin et al 2001; Skirvin et al 2008). Evaluating landscape change through repeat photography is useful because it can provide spatially and temporally specific information about succession and human land use trends (Moseley 2006). Assessing human impacts on the environment is well suited to repeat photography (Zier and Baker 2006), and it is useful in rural communities that lack other sources of historical vegetation data. In China, forest policies have been changed because of the information obtained from repeat photography (Moseley 2006), and in other regions, repeat photography is being used to assess short-term changes in rapidly progressing environmental safety concerns (Marck et al 2006)
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