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.

Keywords:

• Gregorian Cadastre
• landscape changes
• land use comparison
• past land use
• Rieti

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Archivio di Stato di Rieti, in particular to the Director Dr. Alfredo Pasquetti, for granting full access to the cartographic heritage of the Gregorian Cadastre and conceding the digital version of the maps. Thanks to Dr. Cinzia Caputo of the Archivio di Stato di Rieti for scanning the land registries. I am also in debt to Prof. Loredana Trocchi for supervising the English. My special thanks to Mrs. Raffaella Cocco for the assistance during the transcription of the land registries, for checking the manuscript and for the moral support.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

Part of the data that support the findings of this study were derived from the following resources available in the public domain: https://dati.lazio.it/catalog/it/dataset/carta-forestale-su-base-tipologica-della-regione-lazio; https://dati.lazio.it/catalog/it/dataset/2014-carta-tecnica-regionale-numerica-scala-1-5-000-provincia-di-rieti. The data about the vectorised version of the Gregorian Cadastre of Rieti is available from the corresponding author, FV, upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received to support this study.

Notes on contributors

Federico Vessella

Federico Vessella is a PhD in ‘Forest and environmental management’, clerk at the Department of Agriculture and Forestry of the Università degli Studi della Tuscia, brench of Rieti, and lecturer of ‘Territorial Information System’ at the bachelor course of ‘Scienze della Montagna’ (Mountain Sciences) in Rieti. The latest research interests are focused on the history of cartography, historical GIS and historical geography.