Towards the large-scale extraction of historical land cover information from historical maps

Historical, fine-grained geospatial datasets on built-up areas are rarely available, constraining studies of urbanization, settlement evolution, or the dynamics of human–environment interactions to recent decades. In order to provide such historical data, we used publicly available cadastral building data for Spain and created a series of gridded surfaces, measuring age, physical, and land-use-related features of the built environment in Spain and the evolution of settlements from 1900 to 2020.

Fine-grained geospatial data on the spatial distribution of human settlements are scarce prior to the era of remote-sensing-based Earth observation. In this paper, we present datasets derived from a large, novel building stock database, enabling the spatially explicit analysis of 200 years of land development in the United States at an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. These datasets greatly facilitate long-term studies of socio-environmental systems in the conterminous USA.