150 years’ land use change and landscape dynamics digitized from historical paper map and aerial photos over Chancellorsville

150 years’ land use change and landscape dynamics digitized from historical paper map and aerial photos over ChancellorsvilleTracking Earth’s past can help move landscape sustainability from hindsight to foresight, but historical land-use data are often scarce. To help fill this gap, we combined an 1867 paper-based Civil War–era map with modern aerial photos to reconstruct fine-scale land-use change near Chancellorsville, Virginia (USA) from 1867 to 2014, and evaluated object-based image analysis and Random Forest (RF) for processing and classification.Automated classification of the scanned 1867 map was difficult, though object-based segmentation aided manual digitization. For aerial imagery, object-based classification outperformed pixel-based methods when segmentation was properly tuned. RF rankings indicated spectral features were far more informative than shape/geometry for land-cover discrimination. Over 147 years, 32% of the area changed land type: settlement and roads expanded by 1850% and 691%, respectively, while woodland declined by 19%, increasing fragmentation and affecting hydrology and river morphology. These findings underscore the value of old maps for land-use and global change research and the need to preserve and georeference today’s non-traditional data (e.g., photos, videos, citizen science) as future baselines.