A Century of forest management mapping

Large scale, detailed maps have been produced and maintained by forestry agencies in many parts of central Europe since the mid nineteenth century. This paper describes a series of maps supporting the management of a forest area in Austria from 1872 until 1996. The last edition of this series marks the end of an era of forest mapping based on traditional to surveying and manual cartography. The historical development of this map series is examined in terms of the type and amount of spatial information. It was found that the locational accuracy of the various maps does not significantly vary. Historical forest maps provide a record of past management practice and may therefore be usefully incorporated into spatial information systems to support current management. Several approaches to converting the forest maps of various dates to digital form were tested and found to give some improvement in metric quality. The remaining relative locational disagreements hamper the incorporation of these historical data in a GIS database.