More than trees: The challenges of creating a geodatabase to capture the complexity of forest history

ABSTRACT European forests have been copiously documented for centuries. However, forest-related archival sources were rarely utilised to their full potential, mainly because of the difficulties in producing compatible data from large amounts of very different sources. Furthermore, analysing such data for larger areas in high resolution was hardly possible prior to the emergence of historical GIS. This paper presents the geodatabase of the LONGWOOD project, which includes tens of thousands of pieces of information on forest history from the 11th to the 20th century for 3,567 townships in the eastern Czech Republic (c. 27,000 km2). The paper describes the challenges we met, briefly summarizes the results, evaluates the database in a worldwide context and introduces possible directions for future research.