Schaffer, Gad; Peer, Mor; Levin, Noam (2015): Land cover of the Galilee region, digitized from the PEF Survey of Western Palestine (1880) [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.846881,

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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 Palestine Exploration Fund Survey of Western Palestine (PEF) was made in 1871-1877 by surveyors from the British Royal Engineer Corps appointed by the Palestine Exploration Fund, a British research society (Conder and Kitchener 1871-1877, Conder et al. 1881). Although we do not know how long it took the PEF surveyors to investigate the study area - Galilee (Israel), we do know that most of the study area was surveyed in 1877, with certain areas in the southern part of the study area surveyed in 1875 (Conder and Kitchener 1871-1877). The scale of the PEF map is 1:63,360 and it shows various landscape features, and uses shading to depict the topography. This map was scanned by the National Library of Israel (Map JB 900A [4] I 1918) at a resolution of 300 dpi. The entire PEF map was already digitized in a previous work (Schaffer & Levin, In press). Nonetheless, for this research proposes we had to generalize some of the classes (reducing the total classes from 18 to 9) so that the land classes on both maps, the PEF and Levés en Galilée will match. For example, three separate classes found on the complete PEF digitized map: 'scrub' 'scattered wood' and 'dense wood' were merged into one class 'Mediterranean natural vegetation' in this layer. Land cover features were digitized as polygons from the PEF map at a screen scale of 1:15,000. Where available, the names of drawn built-up areas were added to its attribute table. We also 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.