I think the artist missed the mark.
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But they got funny bears standing on rear legs close to cows.)
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Vermont is interesting because most of the landscape was in much worse condition in 1962 than it is now. However it’s absolutely true that this is useful in finding old forest. If it’s mature now and was mature in 1962, it’s got to be old, though not usually true old growth.
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My area was a huge mining region during the industrial revolution. The old maps show the town blanketed with railways, mining buildings, brickworks and tip sites for the waste material. If you came here now you’d never believe it unless you looked very closely. The lakes where I watch birds used to be industrial feeder ponds and the nature reserves are built over the old tips.
My local woods is a post-war forestry project to supply wood for a future war that never happened (thankfully) the old farm buildings that were bulldozed to make the woods are still there if you look and the old maps tell a story of what was there before.
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Old maps are crucial to understand nature in my area (Hainaut, Northern France) for a few reasons. Besides urban sprawl, industry (mainly coal mining and steel) and transports have transformed the landscape quite a bit, both by destroying natural spaces (especially wetland since the early medieval period, both to free up space for human use and to make the Escaut/Scheldt navigable) and creating new ones: plenty of ponds are the remains of mine collapses, and spoil tips are now the site for some of the most interesting nature preserves in the area.
The Institut National Géographique has a great collection of old aerial photos, mainly from military surveys, which have been made easily accessible not too long ago.
The Bibliothèque Nationale also has an historic map base, most of them are pretty large scale and not that useful IMO to our purposes, but there are a few gems hidden in there.
I’ve been trying to find maps, photos, etc. of a few sites (mainly the Etang du Vignoble/Etang de Trith in Valenciennes and the ponds at Condé-sur-Escaut), there isn’t one singular source AFAIK but I will definitely be making journal posts once I have something decently informative.
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It’s also an bit depressing sometimes. I think Google Earth maps has a satellite image archive going back to the 70’s or something, and I had heard of many a classic insect collecting locality be destroyed. You click in the 1970’s or 1980’s and see a beautiful habitat and then click to the next decade and suddenly it has been replaced by a strip mall. You wished you had a time machine. Sobering to think the next generation of entomologists will look at your specimen labels and say the same thing about some of the places I managed to collect in my life.
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Right, you can turn on street names and they will be shown in the middle of a field or forest.
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I used satellite imagery dating to 1984 to quantify landcover change in an area southeast of Dallas, TX as a portion of my master’s thesis. There were definitely some interesting parts (like the construction of a dam and subsequent flooding of a large area for the construction of a reservoir).
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