Schaffer, Gad; Peer, Mor; Levin, Noam (2015): Land cover of the Galilee region, digitized from the Leves en Galilée (LG) map (1870) [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.846880,

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In supplement to: Schaffer, G et al. (2015): Quantifying the completeness of and correspondence between two historical maps: a case study from nineteenth-century Palestine. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 43(2), 154-175, https://doi.org/10.1080/15230406.2015.1029519

The Galilee is a region with significant natural and topographical value, including several large protected areas, one of which is Mount Meron (1,208 meters high). The Levés en Galilée (LG) map (trans. Surveys in Galilee), was made between May and August of 1870 by two French military captains, Jean-Joseph Mieulet and Isidore Antoine Michel Derrien (Mieulet and Derrien 1870, Gavish 1991, 1994). The aim of these two officers was to construct a new map of Palestine; however, they were recalled to France at the outbreak of the war with Germany (Maunoir et al., 1871). The scale of the LG map was 1:100,000 and it shows various landscape features in great details, including contour lines at vertical intervals of 20 meters. The map was scanned by the National Library of France (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Cartes et Plans, GE C-2112) at a resolution of 300 dpi. As the LG map was not accompanied by a legend, after examining it and other historical maps including the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) Survey of Western Palestine, we defined nine broad land cover classes that appeared to represent the drawn features on both the PEF map and LG map. Land cover features were digitized as polygons from the LG map at a screen scale of 1:15,000 using ArcMAP. Where available, the names of drawn built-up areas were added to its attribute table. We estimated the 'level of certainty' in which we identified the land cover class of each of the digitized polygons (Grossinger et al. 2007): a definite identification of the class of a feature was marked as 1, a partial identification was marked as 2 and an uncertain identification was marked as 3.