Impact of the Cartographer’s Position and Topographic Accessibility on the Accuracy of Historical Land Use Information: Case of the Second Military Survey Maps of the Habsburg Empire

Historical maps are critical for long-term land use reconstructions; however, quantifying the uncertainty involved in comparing historical maps with recent data remains a considerable challenge. To date, many works have focused on the technical aspects of comparing historical and contemporary materi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:ISPRS international journal of geo-information Vol. 10; no. 12; p. 820
Main Authors: Ostafin, Krzysztof, Pietrzak, Małgorzata, Kaim, Dominik
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2021
Subjects:
Accessibility
Accuracy
Cartography
census data
Central Europe
Central European region
historical maps
History
Land use
landscapes
Military
spatial data
Surveying
surveys
topographic accessibility
Topography
Uncertainty
Visibility
Poland
Central European region
ISSN:2220-9964, 2220-9964
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Historical maps are critical for long-term land use reconstructions; however, quantifying the uncertainty involved in comparing historical maps with recent data remains a considerable challenge. To date, many works have focused on the technical aspects of comparing historical and contemporary materials, but the potential sources of uncertainty inherent in historical data remain poorly understood. In this paper, we analyze the impacts of the topographic accessibility and cartographer’s field position on the content quality of historical Austrian second military survey maps by referring to independent census data. Our results show that the topographic accessibility and visibility from the cartographer’s surveying table points had very little impact on the map content quality and that the surveying table point locations were uniformly distributed throughout the area, regardless of the landscape conditions. These findings demonstrate that the second military survey maps can be seen as valuable and consistent historical data sources, making them especially useful for long-term land use research in Central Europe.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
content type line 23
ISSN:2220-9964
2220-9964
DOI:10.3390/ijgi10120820