North Woods Historical Atlas
The North Woods Historical Atlas project is bringing to life archival aerial imagery as a public resource for forest research, management, and education. The Wheatland Lab and Fogler Library Special Collections are working to digitize UMaine’s Sewall Collection of 1 million aerial images covering New England, dating back to 1946–a major expansion of the regional remote sensing record. With modern photogrammetry programs, historical aerial photographs are processed into high resolution, spatially accurate mosaic images suitable for spatial analysis. By applying forest classification and forest-change detection approaches to historical imagery, we can analyze forest-scale changes at spatiotemporal scales not currently possible. The Historical Atlas project is working with partners across the forestry, conservation, and research communities to better understand historical forest dynamics over the past century across the Northeast: from fire dynamics in Acadia, to treeline shift in the White Mountains, to spruce budworm outbreaks in Northern Maine and log drives to the paper mills, the North Woods Historical Atlas offers an important window into the past.
