Digitalization and classification of the Cesare Battisti’s Woodland Map of 1915

Forests represent a biosystem of fundamental importance for the production of ecosystem 1 services useful for guaranteeing at the same time the environmental health and the economic 2 enhancement of a territory. Their sustainable management, in addition to requiring technical 3 knowledge, typical of natural and forestry sciences, cannot ignore the diachronic study of their 4 evolution over time as a result of the interaction between environmental and anthropic dynamics. 5 According to the historical ecology approach, in fact, forests represent a special type of “artifact”, 6 product of social interactions, and can therefore be analyzed and evaluated with the use of historical 7 documentary sources. Following this approach, historical cartography can constitute a precious 8 information tool, in many respects unique, through which it is possible to reconstruct the evolution 9 of the forest cover of a given territory. Trentino, in particular, has a rich heritage of historical 10 maps from which to draw useful information for the construction of a qualitative and quantitative 11 diachronic picture of the evolutionary dynamics of wooded areas. In these territories, forest 12 management is a topic of great importance both for its socio-economic implications and for the more 13 strictly environmental ones, connected to the increasingly urgent need to implement mitigation and 14 adaptation policies towards climate change. This work intends to propose an automated methodology 15 for the digital acquisition of thematic information from historical maps in order to use them for 16 spatial analysis in the GIS field, applied to the evaluation of historical changes in the forest extension 17 in Trentino. Specifically, this methodology was applied to georeference and digitize Cesare Battisti’s 18 map of forest density published in his atlas “Il Trentino. Economic Statistical Illustration” from 1915.