The Palestine Exploration Fund Map (1871–1877) of the Holy Land as a Tool for Analysing Landscape Changes: the Coastal Dunes of Israel as a Case Study

Noam Levin A

37 citations0/0 files storedThe Cartographic Journal

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Historical Geography and Cartography Geography and Environmental Studies Satellite Image Processing and Photogrammetry

Abstract

The Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) maps (1871–1877) are highly praised for their accuracy and completeness; however, no systematic analysis of their accuracy has been done to date. To study the potential of these 1:63,360 maps for a quantitative analysis of land cover changes over a period of time, I have compared them to 20th century topographic maps. The map registration error of the PEF maps was 74.4 m using 123 control points of trigonometrical stations and a 1st order polynomial. The median RMSE of all control and test points (n = 1104) was 153.6 m. As a case study of land cover changes, the area of coastal dunes as shown on the PEF maps was compared with that shown on British Mandate 1:20,000 topo-cadastral maps from c. 1930. In five of the six areas analysed, the yearly dunes movement rate was above the estimated annual error due to data resolution (2.96 m/year). The rate of dune movement south of Acre was found to be between 3.9 and 6.3 m/year (depending on the method used for map registration) between 1874 and 1930. Care should be taken when analysing historical maps, as it cannot be assumed that their accuracy is consistent at different parts or for different features depicted on them.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.

References

2002Historical maps in GIS 2002Systematic Assessment of Maps as Source Information in Landscape-change Research 2002The Impact on Topographic Mapping of Developments in Land and Air Survey: 1900-1939 2000A rubber sheeting algorithm for non-rectangular maps 2002Practical GIS Analysis 2002Sacred, but not surveyed: Nineteenth‐century surveys of Palestine

Cited by

2018An Early Islamic Inter-Settlement Agroecosystem in the Coastal Sand of the Yavneh Dunefield, Israel 2015Quantifying the completeness of and correspondence between two historical maps: a case study from nineteenth-century Palestine 2019Follow the road: historical GIS for evaluating the development of routes in the Negev region during the twentieth century 2014Photogrammetric techniques and surveying applied to historical map analysis 2015Neglected Treasures: Linking Historical Cartography with Environmental Changes in Java, Indonesia 2020Advancing the historical geography of late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine using GIScience: A review 2023Developing and Disseminating a New Historical Geospatial Database from Kitchener’s 19th Century Map of Cyprus

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.