Historical road network of Kenya (1950s – 1980s) extracted from topographic maps (Version 1.1)

This dataset includes a shapefile representing the digitized historical road network of Kenya. It contains over 56,000 km of historical roads extracted from 449 historical topographic maps of 1:50,000 scale and 71 maps of 1:100,000 scale covering the time period from the 1950s to the 1980s. The topographic maps were obtained from various sources in Kenya and the UK. Most of maps were collected in Kenya provided by the Survey of Kenya and several local county governments’ survey and urban planning departments. Additionally, some maps were obtained from archives in Great Britain, namely the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford and the Cambridge University Library. All the acquired maps were originally created and published by the Directorate of Overseas Surveys (DOS), the War Office, General Staff, Geographical Section and the Survey of Kenya. The road data was extracted from these maps using deep learning techniques, including a Python script and ArcGIS Pro “Multi-Task Road Extractor” tool.