Historical Imagery

Description¶

This dataset contains an imagery base layer representing conditions from the mid-1950s across the western United States. The imagery was sourced from over 160,000 aerial images in the USGS EROS Archive taken between 1940 and 1970, with the median acquisition date being 1954. The imagery provides complete coverage for 17 western U.S. states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The imagery was preprocessed in MATLAB to reduce image vignetting and improve image contrast. Orthorectification was performed in Metashape. The compiled imagery had varying Ground Sampling Distance values, ranging from 0.6 to 1.7 meters. The GEE dataset was written out at 1 meter GSD.

Organization¶

University of Montana, Lands for Wildlife, Montana NRCS and Intermountain West Joint Venture

Website¶

https://www.landscapeexplorer.org

Google Earth Engine¶

projects/wlfw-um/assets/historical-imagery/conus-west

Spatial Resolution¶

* 1m

Time Span¶

* 1940 -1970

Variables¶

Terms of Use¶

These datasets are available under the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

References¶

Morford, S.L., Allred, B.W., Jensen, E.R., Maestas, J.D., Mueller, K.R., Pacholski, C.L., Smith, J.T., Tack, J.D., Tackett, K.N. and Naugle, D.E. (2023), Mapping tree cover expansion in Montana, U.S.A. rangelands using high-resolution historical aerial imagery. Remote Sens Ecol Conserv. https://doi.org/10.1002/rse2.357