Archival maps provide a valuable way to explore historical environmental data collected before the use of satellite imagery. Archival maps in their physical form cannot readily be used, however, beyond what the original cartographer intended. In this project, we describe a manual method to bring scanned archival maps into digital form using common tools in a geographic information systems (GIS) software platform. We rely on the important context of West Africa where a generation of geographers as part of the Terroir school worked with local agrarian communities to understand land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics. Specifically, we analyze archival maps of the Yatenga Province in Burkina Faso originally created by Jean-Yves Marchal, who used aerial photography from 1952 and 1973. This article describes the image processing steps to extract LULC data from scanned archival images using the graphical user interface of popular GIS tools. We compare our results to Marchal’s original maps and provide an alternative analysis of LULC change in the region using the newly extracted LULC data.

档案地图提供了一种有价值的方式来探索在使用卫星图像之前收集的历史环境数据。然而，物理形式的档案地图不能轻易使用，超出了原始制图师的意图。在这个项目中，我们描述了一种使用地理信息系统 (GIS) 软件平台中的常用工具将扫描的档案地图转换为数字形式的手动方法。我们依赖于西非的重要背景，一代地理学家是风土的一部分学校与当地农业社区合作，了解土地利用和土地覆盖 (LULC) 动态。具体来说，我们分析了布基纳法索亚腾加省的档案地图，该地图最初由 Jean-Yves Marchal 创建，他在 1952 年和 1973 年使用航空摄影。本文描述了使用图形用户界面从扫描的档案图像中提取 LULC 数据的图像处理步骤流行的 GIS 工具。我们将我们的结果与 Marchal 的原始地图进行比较，并使用新提取的 LULC 数据对该地区的 LULC 变化进行替代分析。