Abstract:
The use of historical aerial photography offers the potential to quadruple the time-depth of
available geo-spatial mass data from 20 years to 80 years to assess past, present and future
environmental and climate change. While satellite imagery only attained sub-1-meter resolution in
the early 2000s, aerial photography with the same resolution had already become ubiquitous in the
1940s, covering all land territories across the globe at 5-10 years intervals. A huge challenge,
however, is how to interpret the features visible on historical aerial photography because the
environments depicted in the imagery have been dramatically transformed by development,
population growth, and modernization. As a result, conventional ground truthing to assess what
the features visible in the photographs represent in the real world is no longer possible. The authors
propose to use a new historical ground truthing methodology using life history interviews to
compile data on land use, climate, vegetation, and the environment contemporary to the times series
of historical aerial photography for each case study. This methodology will allow more historically
accurate interpretation of the aerial photography and facilitate developing machine learning data
sets and culminate in the ability to machine-read historical aerial photography for a more
comprehensive understanding of environmental and climate change from the 1940s through today.
