Land use/cover change in central Tibet, c. 1830–1990: devising a GIS methodology to study a historical Tibetan land decree

Abstract

In this study, historical Tibetan tax-related data pertaining to cultivated land in central Tibet are studied by means of GIS and compared with contemporary patterns. A Tibetan land decree from 1830 contains aggregated data on the amount of land-based tax units for estates in 57 districts of central Tibet. The purpose of this study is to devise a GIS methodology to study the potential utility of these data for historical geographical research, and to determine the approximate changes in cultivated land areas between 1830 and 1990. Traditional Tibetan tax data are significant for current efforts to construct historical land cover databases of the Tibetan Plateau region for the study of the human dimensions of global change.

Common Property and Power: Insights from a Spatial Analysis of Historical and Contemporary Pasture Boundaries among Pastoralists in Central Tibet

“…The cumulative result of my efforts was a gazetteer of the Porong region (4034 km 2 ) which contained over 1400 place names, of which more than 500 points were geo-referenced using a GPS unit and remote sensing technologies. 8 With the exception of work Karl Ryavec's (1998Ryavec's ( , 2001) spatial analyses of census data from the Iron Tiger year (1838), I know of no other attempts to systematically explore historical data compiled by the various bureaucracies of indigenous Tibetan polities using GIS technologies. Others have constructed GIS models of Central Asian pastoralism, e.g., in Afghanistan (Casimir et al 1992) and Mongolia (Rasmussen et al 1999, Christensen et al 1998, Christensen et al 1999.…”

New Developments in the Use of Spatial Technology in Archaeology

“…Geographic information systems have gradually become the platform that archaeologists use to store geographically and numerically large sets of information on the artifact, feature, and site levels using its read-write capability. These changes have been especially important in cultural resource management and influence how archaeologists approach the study of the historic and prehistoric past (Berry 2003;Dyson-Bruce 2003;Ford 2007;Gregory and Ell 2006;Limp 2001;Ryavec 2001;Stichelbaut 2006). Universities, museums, and government agencies have joined forces at national and local levels to support databases with locational information.…”

Considerations for ecological reconstruction of historic vegetation: Analysis of the spatial uncertainties in the California Vegetation Type Map dataset

“…Where PLS data is not available, some researchers have used less systematic historical records to reconstruct past vegetation conditions, or land use patterns (Russell 1981;Jackson et al 2000;Ryavec 2001;Wilson 2005). For example, Wilson (2005) used 19th century lumber surveys to estimate potential forest in Maine; and Jackson et al (2000) used land survey notes and forest resource inventories to reconstruct forest abundance in Ontario, Canada.…”

“…attribute errors) (Bourdo 1956;Galatowitsch 1990;Manies et al 2001;Schulte and Mladenoff 2001;Schulte et al 2002) and in the reporting of the locations of both point samples, linear features, and polygonal features like habitat polygons or land parcels (i.e. positional errors) (Ryavec 2001;Gregory 2002). These uncertainties need to be considered and evaluated before the use of historic ecological data begins, and this paper deals specifically with the positional error found in a historic database.…”