Mapping Historical Land-Use and Land-Cover Change in Central Oklahoma: Integrating Historical Geospatial Data and Modern Aerial Imagery, 1871-2023

Abstract

Reconstructing long-term land-cover change in heterogeneous landscapes is constrained by the fact that no single archive captures more than a century of fine-grained change, and that historical geospatial data are often inaccessible to the researchers who could use them. This thesis integrates nineteenth-century Public Land Survey System records, twentieth-century historical aerial photography, and modern orthophotography into a continuous, patch-scale reconstruction of land-cover change in the Upper Finn Creek Watershed (~1,300 ha), McClain County, Central Oklahoma, spanning 1871 to 2023, and applies that reconstruction at the site scale within University of Oklahoma’s Kessler Atmospheric and Ecological Field Station (KAEFS). Eleven land-cover maps were produced using a consistent six-class legend, manual photointerpretation of historical sources, and object-based classification of recent imagery, with overall accuracy ranging from 80.7% to 91.8%. The reconstruction reveals three phases of change: rapid post-settlement cultivation expansion to a maximum of 57.6% of the watershed by 1937, subsequent cultivation decline and grassland-pasture increase, and pronounced woody expansion after 1981, when forest rose from a low of 189.7 ha (14.6% of the watershed) to 459.0 ha (35.3%) by 2023. These transitions shifted from broad, contiguous cultivation blocks to diffuse grassland-to-forest infilling consistent with eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) encroachment. To make these products usable, the reconstruction was organized into an interactive web platform (K-Viz) and applied at KAEFS, where roughly 78% of the station changed land cover class more than once since 1871. Historical imagery independently placed 15 sampled eastern redcedar trees at a mean detection-based age of 14.0 years, substantially younger than their mean allometric age of 28.1 years, indicating that field-based ages may overstate the duration of encroachment influence. This work demonstrates that integrating survey records, archival photography, and modern imagery yields a historically grounded, spatially explicit, and accessible basis for interpreting present-day landscapes shaped more by their past than their current appearance suggests.