Measuring long-term landscape change using historical photographs and the WSL Monoplotting Tool

Abstract

This paper assesses the potential of software developed by the research group of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in order to georeference and vectorise historical landscape photographs. The use of this 'Monoplotting' Tool introduces a new application for topographical photographs and opens up the possibility of using such photographs for measuring land-use change. This paper reviews the literature on the use of historical photographs for landscape history. It introduces the new software and then goes on to examine how vectorised topographical photographs may help in the measurement of land-use changes in the mountainous landscape of Liguria and Trentino in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.

Georeferencing Oblique Aerial Wildfire Photographs: An Untapped Source of Fire Behaviour Data

“…All wildfire images used in this study were taken from aircraft at moderate angles of incidence, which likely contributed to their level of accuracy (Table 4). This finding supports the relationship between angle of incidence and accuracy, because when the angle of incidence increases, the overall accuracy of the georeferenced image increases [20,37]. The angle of incidence is dependent on the position of the camera and the DEM at which it intersects; therefore, the angle of incidence can be heavily influenced by the terrain of the landscape present in the image, as well as the height and angle of obliquity of the camera when the image was taken.…”

“…Previous research shows that the quality of the photographs, the angle of incidence of the camera and the resolution of the DEM and orthoimage used in the monoplotting process all influence the placement and precision of GCPs, and significantly affect the accuracy of a georeferenced image [20,21,25,37]. However, because these factors were very similar between our five sites, we were not able to evaluate their influence in this Fire 2021, 4, 81 wildfire application.…”

Quantifying historical landscape change with repeat photography: an accuracy assessment of geospatial data obtained through monoplotting

“…Most studies reported only the theoretical 3D-error that is automatically calculated by the tool based on the GCPs (Bozzini et al 2012, Scapozza et al 2014, Conedara et al 2018, while Wiesmann et al (2012) also reported experimental results for line features. In contrast, Gimmi et al (2016) and Gabellieri and Watkins (2019) did not report any qualitative measurements at all. Kolecka et al (2015) and Bühler et al (2019) used single georeferenced photographs to validate the accuracy of classification results from LiDAR and satellite imagery but did not evaluate the accuracy of features extracted from the photographs.…”

“…Researchers from the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL have developed the WSL Monoplotting Tool (WSL-MPT) which allows to process single landscape photographs in a very user-friendly way (Bozzini et al 2012). So far, the WSL-MPT has been used for the quantitative analysis of natural hazards (Bozzini et al 2012, Conedara et al 2018, glacial processes (Wiesmann et al 2012, Scapozza et al 2014 and land cover changes (Stockdale et al 2015, 2019, McCaffrey and Hopkinson 2017, 2020, Gabellieri and Watkins 2019.…”

De la carte diachronique à la trajectoire géohistorique : modélisation du changement paysager d’un cône torrentiel

“…Trois méthodes ont été utilisées pour cartographier l'occupation des sols : (1) la numérisation manuelle dans un SIG, la plus légitime pour interpréter les cartes et les plans(2) le monoplotting par photo-comparaison, qui permet de vectoriser l'occupation des sols sur une photographie oblique(Bozzini et al, 2012 ;Gabellieri et Watkins, 2019) et (3) la numérisation et la segmentation en télédétection, qui ont l'avantage de préinterpréter les images aériennes(Hugerot et al, 2017). Le découpage parcellaire a été considéré comme canevas de référence pour l'ensemble du corpus.…”