Measuring long-term landscape change using historical photographs and the WSL Monoplotting Tool

This paper assesses the potential of software developed by the research group of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in order to georeference and vectorise historical landscape photographs. The use of this ‘Monoplotting’ Tool introduces a new application for topographical photographs and opens up the possibility of using such photographs for measuring land-use change. This paper reviews the literature on the use of historical photographs for landscape history. It introduces the new software and then goes on to examine how vectorised topographical photographs may help in the measurement of land-use changes in the mountainous landscape of Liguria and Trentino in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.