War landform mapping and classification on the Verdun battlefield (France) using airborne LiDAR and multivariate analysis

Abstract

Acting as efficient earth‐movers, soldiers can be viewed as significant geomorphological drivers of landscape change when replaced in the recent debates on Anthropocene Geomorphology. ‘Polemoforms’, generated by military activities, correspond with a set of human‐made landforms of various sizes and geometries. They are particularly common on the World War One battlefield of Verdun (France) which ranks among the largest battles of attrition along the Western Front. The artillery bombardments and building of defensive positions in that battle significantly altered the landscape, resulting in thousands of shell craters, dugouts, and gun positions that have altered both the meso and microtopography. This paper proposes an innovative methodology to make an exhaustive inventory of these small‐scale conflict‐induced landforms (excluding linear features such as trenches) using a digital terrain model (DTM) acquired by airborne LiDAR on the whole battlefield. Morphometric analysis was conducted using Kohonen's self‐organizing maps (SOMs) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) in order to quantify and classify the high number of war landforms. This combined approach allowed for mapping more than one million landforms which can be classified into eight different shapes including shell craters and various soldier‐made landforms (i.e. shelters, gun positions, etc.). Detection quality evaluation using field observations revealed the algorithm successfully classified 93% of shell craters and 74% of anthropologically constructed landforms. Finally, the iconographic database and map series produced will help archaeologists and foresters to better manage the historic site of Verdun, today covered by a large forest of ~10 000 ha. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Les noms de tranchées et de boyaux de la Grande Guerre en Champagne

“…La valeur opérationnelle de la banque de données toponymique des noms de tranchées est vérifiée dans le cadre de l'archéologie préventive, de la valorisation patrimoniale, des recherches généalogiques (géolocalisation des morts pour la France), et du zonage des risques géotechniques (aléas cavités) et pyrotechniques. Elle s'exprime davantage avec les héritages morphologiques de la Grande guerre révélés par le lidar (Taborelli et al, 2017b ;De Matos-Machado et al, 2019). The toponymy of battlefield and more particularly the trench names of the Great War remains little known without spatial analysis or statistics.…”

The heritage of the Second World War: bombing in the forests and wetlands of the Koźle Basin

“…In Western Europe, bomb craters are often protected in multiple ways (cf. Passmore & Harrison 2008; Capps-Tunwell et al 2016; de Matos-Machado et al 2019), but this is not the case in Poland. It has taken only a short time for the bomb craters of the Koźle Basin to become new elements of a considerably transformed forest and wetland ecosystem (cf.…”

“…Most archaeological research on areas similarly transformed by artillery shells or bombs dropped from aircraft concentrates on northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and includes descriptions of craters from both the First and Second World Wars (e.g. Passmore et al 2014, 2018; Capps-Tunwell et al 2016, 2018; de Matos-Machado et al 2019; van der Schriek 2019; Passmore & Capps-Tunwell 2020). In Poland there has been relatively little research on such landscapes (see Kobiałka 2017, 2018).…”

“…Over the past decade or so, researchers have paid particular attention to the role of lidar image analysis and other detection methods in studying former battlefields—especially those that are now covered by dense vegetation (e.g. Hesse 2010; Passmore et al 2014; van der Schriek & Beex 2017; Brenner et al 2018; Gheyle et al 2018; Clermont et al 2019; Kruse et al 2019; de Matos-Machado et al 2019; Note et al 2019; Passmore & Capps-Tunwell 2020).…”

Cartographie semi-automatisée et classification des réseaux de tranchées et boyaux du champ de bataille de Verdun à partir du LiDAR aéroporté

“…Pour pallier ces insuffisances, cet article propose une méthode de cartographie semi-automatique alternative, appliquée aux 100 km² du champ de bataille de Verdun (rive droite). Il complète notre précédente publication (De Matos-Machado et al, 2019) en s'intéressant cette fois-ci à l'inventaire des réseaux de fossés.…”