Historical Aerial Photography for Landscape Analysis

Abstract

Historic patterns and spatial heterogeneity of past landscapes can greatly influence dynamics of contemporary landscapes. Historical conditions lay the foundation for contemporary management options and can help guide restoration goals. While historical spatial data sources are not extremely common, historical aerial photography is among the longest available, spatially contiguous record of landscape change. Aerial photography has been routinely collected since the 1930s in many parts of the world and has aided land management for over 75 years. Aerial photography often forms the basis of a variety of maps routinely used by managers, including forest ecosystem inventories and digital elevation models (or DEMs). Aerial photographs generally provide higher spatial resolution information than widely available (and free) satellite imagery (e.g., Landsat). Thus, aerial photographs have important and unique value for mapping historical landscape baselines and assessing long-term landscape change. For these reasons, understanding how information is derived from aerial photography is enormously important for landscape ecologists. The objectives of this lab are to help students.