Historical hydrographic vector features, Drava River Catchment, 1816-1836, Nov. 2022

This metadata refers to the vector dataset digitised from three historical military topographical map series: "Tyrol (1816-1821)", “Illyria (1829-1835)” and “Styria (1821-1836)” covering a period from 1816-1836. All of them correspond to Second military survey of the Habsburg Empire (owned by the Austrian State Archive). The focus has been on the Danube river basin area where this metadata covers the third of three pilot areas. This pilot-3 area (Drava River catchment) covers approximately 12,000 km2 distributed in 73 historical map tiles in scale 1:28,800 provided by Arcanum Maps services (https://maps.arcanum.com/en/). Hydrographic features were identified in the historical maps supported by the legend information (https://www.arcanum.com/media/uploads/mapire/legend/secondsurvey1.pdf). The feature classes and attributes specified were used as basis in the digitisation process. The characteristics of the pilot-3 is a mixed Mountainous area and low land area. The Copernicus Land product Riparian Zones (RZ) layer for the reference year 2018 was used as a mask when digitising, representing 2,325km2 of the total area. The objective with this dataset is to support the process of restoring Europe's free flowing rivers as part of the EU's biodiversity strategy for 2030 (https://environment.ec.europa.eu/strategy/biodiversity-strategy-2030_en). The strategy aims to put Europe's biodiversity on a path to recovery by 2030, and contains specific actions and commitments. Among them, the restoration of 25,000 km of rivers through removals of dams, channels, barriers, etc. is highlighted. The dataset clearly visualise the hydrological features complemented in the military maps in the past. Visualised with contemporary data it provides an overview of the changes made. The high complexity of the branched rivers is very interesting since they correspond to rivers in its natural state. This pilot may help to better understand the possibilities of developing quantitative measurements that allow for better "identification" of areas suitable for restoration.