Methodology for creating historical land use databases : a case study for ICOS-station Hyltemossa, Sweden

Sammanfattning: This thesis studies how modern spatio temporal databases of land use changes can be created based on historical maps. The entire study was conducted based on the available maps over the study area, in southern Sweden. The research was conducted in such a manner that it presents to what extent can land use changes affect biodiversity and climate change. The thesis is not focused on what are the drivers for land use conversions, but rather how could changes in land use be easier identified when working with a set of (historical) maps over the same area. Based on a very first decision, in terms of what land use data can be used in further studies by different research communities, a study was conducted as to determinate what are the available historical sources. A database was created, containing land use data, classified accordingly to modern international land cover classification, extracted from historical maps, during the time frame 1812 - 2006. Considering the needs in terms of land use conversion for the biodiversity and carbon modeling communities, analyzing tools were developed to provide a fast and efficient way to easily identify in which time frame drastic land use conversions occurred and how much the study area was affected. The tools were created as to ease the preliminary analysis on land use maps, to quickly identify changes based on statistics, rather than visual analysis. The historical land-use database was tested over a study area in southern Sweden. The tool developed is able to extract statistics from at least 2 maps simultaneous and express how much of land class there is on each map. The users can quickly retrieve statistics when the surfaces for each land class are available.