Date of Award

1-1-2019

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Organizational Unit

Geography and the Environment

First Advisor

Michael Daniels, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Susan Schulten, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Kristopher Kuzera, Ph.D.

Fourth Advisor

Helen Hazen, Ph.D.

Keywords

Geographical information systems, Historical GIS, LULC, Land-use and land-cover

Abstract

In the South Bohemian region of the Czech Republic, the landscape is distinguished by a network of long narrow fields bordered by hedgerows clustered in small groups. These unique clusters of hedgerows have been interacting with their environment, effectively mitigating erosion, since they were first established in the High Middle Ages. In this research project I used historical maps to characterize land-use and land-cover (LULC) change relating to hedgerow features in one cadastral territory in the Blanice Watershed. Using georeferenced historical maps from 1837 and 1952, and unreferenced historical maps from 1837 to 1953, I compared the historical LULC to the current LULC within the cadastral territory of Křišťanovice. From 1837 to present-day Křišťanovice, the percentage of farmed land has decreased from 59.9% to 25.8%, while the percentage of forested area has increased from 26.6% to 61.9%. These changes reflect historical trends in land management as well as the impact of social and political changes on the environment. This project is also a methodological and epistemological exploration of a Historical GIS approach to research, and the methods developed to conduct LULC change analysis reflect these theoretical components. The results of this research provide a spatiotemporal HGIS analysis of LULC change, a workflow for applying the HGIS methods developed for this research, and a geodatabase for the storage, classification, and visualization of historical LULC data.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Kelly J Measom

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

86 p.

Discipline

Geography, Geographic information science and geodesy

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