The role of historical cartography to evaluate the landscape evolution in the last two centuries: a case study in central Italy

Abstract

The study of landscape evolution in areas characterised by long-term anthropic presence needs a multidisciplinary approach, including the investigation of historical cartography. This work highlights the effectiveness of coupling the old cadastres and land registers within a GIS platform to reconstruct a digitised land use map to be compared with present-time data. The method proposed here can be applied wherever historical maps are available. The case study, I am going to discuss, is in Central Italy (Rieti) and the Gregorian Cadastre of the Papal State (1819) is chosen to be georeferenced and vectorised. The quality-quantitative results depict a rural world with few remnants from the past, with significant landscape changes compared to modern data. These findings provide relevant information for planning processes, nature conservation, and land management. © 2024 Landscape Research Group Ltd.