Military Maps

his article analyzes how the military demand for spatial data was an important driver for the topographic mapping of the Danish territory from approximately 1750 to the present. Consequently the history of topographic surveying of Denmark cannot be understood without understanding of its military origin. The military cartographic tradition in Denmark was developed in order to provide the army with spatial data about the landscape to be used for operational planning and tactical decisions-making as well as training of troops and commanding officers. he basic concept for military cartography was brought to the country by foreign officers of German origin. However, the army was also inspired and partly driven by the development of the civil sciences of geodesy and cartography. Lessons learned from the wars of 1807-1814 and 1848-1850 had a major impact on the development of the Danish military cartography, as the understanding of the needs for spatial data for military purpose was crystallized during these two
wars. The Danish military cartographic tradition has demonstrated a lexible ability to adapt to diferent operational and technological demands during the last 250 years, from the general mapping of terrain to specialized cartography for crosscountry movement and fortress warfare. Even though there has been an increasing civil demand for spatial data, this demand has only to a limited degree inluenced
the Danish military cartographic concept. However, diferent military
agencies have traded heavily on civil data such as the manuscript maps of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters, and later on the various versions of cadastral maps. Three periods characterize the development of the military cartographic concept of the Danish armed forces.
(1) An initial phase of conceptual development (1750-1842).
(2) he implementation phase (1842-1928).
(3) A phase of maintenance and specialization (1928 – present).

This aim of this article is to analyse the role of cartography in operational activities during the Great Northern War. So far, only Swedish materials from that period have
been studied, and this work involves two maps made for the needs of the Russian army by Engineer-General Joseph-Gaspar Lambert de Guerin (in Russian: Žozef Gaspar Lamber de Geren. They were produced within the first three months of 1706 for the needs of the so-called Campaign of Grodno. Cartographic materials show that the Russian army comissioned engineers to conduct a preliminary terrain survey at the time. Initially, the officers devised marching routes from Grodno to Tykocin (only one such map has been preserved: Carte d’une partie de la Lithuanie et de la Pologne). At least four such routes were surveyed; three places were also found where the Neman river could be crossed, as well as fords and bridges that allowed the army to cross over the Biebrza river. Then, in the second phase, as the whole army had to flee from Swedish troops, all the routes were combined on one map: Environs de Grodno et Ticochin. This text presents the mistakes made by Lambert when producing this map. Despite its imperfections, the cartographic documentation contributed to the successful escape of the Russian forces from Grodno (22.03/2.04). After reaching Tykocin, Peter I’s troops successfully crossed the Narew river (29.03/9.04) and then went toward Brest Litovsk (4/15.04). The estimated average daily marching speed was 18.9 km, but within the two recorded days, the army managed to walk almost 70 km.

Tracking Earth's past helps us to move from hindsight to foresight in seeking landscape sustainability, a pursuit aided by modern mapping capabilities but hindered by a dearth of historical landscape information. To fill the data gap and exemplify the use of old maps for land-use change sciences, we combined an old paper-based US civil war map and modern aerial photos to derive land-use history and landscape dynamics at fine scales for a region near Chancellorsville, USA, from 1867 to 2014. We also tested how advanced algorithms-object-based image analysis and Random Forests (RF)-could aid in data processing. Automatic classification of the scanned 1867 paper map proved difficult, but its manual digitization could benefit from object-based image segmenta-tion. Classifying digital aerial images was more accurate via the object-based than pixel-based method, but only if the images were segmented appropriately. In the object-based classification, spectral-based features were much more important and useful than shape/geometry features for land-cover discrimination, as ranked by RF. During the 147 years, 32% of the region changed in land type. Settlement and roads increased in extent by 1850% and 691%, respectively, and woodland decreased by 19%. These changes fragmented the landscape, altered the hydrological regime, and affected river morphology. The utility of old maps exemplified here provides an impetus for leveraging extant old maps or historical records to support land-use and global change research. Our study also connotes the importance of preserving and geotagging current non-traditional data, such as photos, videos, and citizen science data, that can serve as a baseline to document future landscape change.

The ‘secret world of Russia’s Cold War mapmakers’, long an arcane topic of interest to a select few, first reached popular readership via a 2015 Wired article. Journalist Greg Miller interviewed geographers, cartographic scholars, and map dealers to tell the story of classified Soviet military maps, produced from the 1940s to the 1980s, depicting foreign locales in stunning detail. The hook of the story was, naturally, the clandestine and incisive nature of these maps and their data. The maps were marked ‘SECRET’ and subject to tight security controls. They included niche details not available on publically available Western maps of the same areas, details that must have been gathered in person or via overhead imagery. These included load capacities of bridges, specific outputs of individual factories, security perimeters, and infrastructural details of military installations left off public maps, even specific depths of littoral and riverine areas. How and why did the USSR map such details? John Davies and Alex Kent, two of Miller’s interviewees – indeed, two scholars largely responsible for the exhaustive collection and study of the maps at the center of the Wired article – have published their own treatment of the subject. Red Atlas is a masterful, expert dissection of the thousands of Soviet military maps that have bubbled up to public visibility in the West, ranging in scale and scope from large area 1:4,000,000 scale air navigation charts down to 1:10,000 city maps. Most importantly, it offers forensic analysis of who made the maps, how, and why. In grappling with these questions, Davies and Kent expand the literature on cartographic intelligence in new and exciting ways.

International historiography has extensively assessed the innovations in war practice experienced during the First World War. However, the consequences of trench warfare in military cartographic production have not been fully investigated yet. Following this line, the essay presents the cartographic corpus of the historical archive of the 3rd Army; the 3rd Army had a fundamental role in the conflict, settling on the Piave river after Caporetto and leading the final advance towards Istria. The analysis of the collection, which is still unpublished, can open a new front of research aimed at developing categories of semiological analysis and typological classification of military maps as sources produced in fieri, i.e. manuscript IGM maps that were constantly updated during war operations. First, the cartographic corpus is presented; second, a first typological classification and a semiological decoding of maps are proposed, based on the interpretation of the symbols used, of the legend and of the methods of representation. In particular, the contribution focuses on  tactical maps, i.e. cartographies that were continuously updated in proelio to document the evolution of war events on the front line.