Land cover changes since the 19th century detected from historic maps for environmental applications: toward a “CORINE 1800” project?

The value of cartographic heritage for environmental applications is demonstrated with a test case in the Cen-tral Italian Alps. Land cover changes since the early 19th century are detected from sample maps in Lombardy of the Second Military survey of the Habsburg Empire (1816-1821), available on the portal mapire.eu. They are compared with 1954 aerial surveys and successive land use classification until 2018. Issues as land useclasses homogenization, data vectorization, georeferencing errors are addressed. The dynamics of four main land-use classes (woods, meadows, crops and urbanized areas) are investigated and the potential use of this exercise for hydrological applications is explored. The impact of the observed natural afforestation on changes of hydrological losses due to evapotranspiration and its influence as a likely cause of the decrease of runoff monitored since 1845 in the Adda river basin are assessed. The proposed test case can pave the road of a project extended at European scale, a sort of “CORINE 1800 land use” Geographic Information System which can have several environmental, cartographic and socio-economic applications.