Jede Landschaft hat eine Geschichte, die bis zum heutigen Erscheinungsbild geführt hat. Dies gilt auch für die Kulturlandschaft Mecklenburg -Vorpommerns. Hierfür liegen Informationen in Form von Karten und Messwerten, etwa seit dem Jahre 1786, vor.

Ziel des Projekts „Virtuelles Kulturlandschaftslaboratorium“ ist es, jene Daten von ihrer analogen in die digitale Form zu überführen und sie für andere Nutzergruppen, vor allem Wissenschaftler, zugänglich zu machen.

Das interdisziplinäre Team der Universität Rostock beschäftigt sich seit Juli 2010 mit dieser Aufgabe und wird dabei von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft unterstützt. Die Wissenschaftler und Mitarbeiter des Teams kommen größtenteils von der Agrar- und Umweltwissenschaftlichen Fakultät, aber auch das Institut für Biowissenschaften, das Historische Institut, das Rechenzentrum und die Universitätsbibliothek sind beteiligt.

Inhaltlich umfasst das Projekt Untersuchungen und Digitalisierung von Veränderungen der Kulturlandschaft, z.B. von Wäldern, Gewässerverläufen, Siedlungen und Dörfern, Flächennutzung und landschaftsprägenden Elementen (u.a. Sölle).

Um diese Daten verfügbar zu machen, wird an einem internetbasierten Forschungsportal und einer zugrunde liegenden Geodateninfrastruktur gearbeitet.

Nähere Informationen sind auf dieser Website zu finden.

Spatio-temporal landscape research in a virtual research environment (VKLandLab)

For over a decade the professorship of Geodesy and Geoinformatics is dealing with the exploitation of historical maps (sometimes also called old maps) in digital form as a source of interdisciplinary landscape research. A comprehensive historical set of maps relating to the area of the historical Mecklenburg was digitized, georeferenced and investigated with respect to geometric and thematic quality. This covers georeferenced old maps from around 1786 (from Wiebeking, 48 sheets at a scale 1:24.000 and Schmettau, 1788, 16 sheets at a scale 1:50.000) until 1890 (the Prussian topographic map sheets, 168 sheets at a scale 1:25.000), in total an area of around 15.000 km².

The aim of the research project is to set up a virtual research environment for interdisciplinary research focusing on the landscape of the historical Mecklenburg. The Virtual Laboratory for Cultural Landscape Research (VKLandLab) is designed and developed by the Chair of Geodesy and Geoinformatics, hosted at the Computing Centre (ITMZ) and linked to the Digital Library (UB) at Rostock University. VKLandLab includes new developments such as wikis, blogs, data tagging, etc.  and proven components already integrated in various data-related infrastructures such as InternetGIS, data repositories and authentication structures. The focus is to build a data-related infrastructure and a work platform that supports students as well as professional researchers from different disciplines in their research in space and time.

The technological platform is evaluated and used by an interdisciplinary team of students and researchers for their research lines. Different scientific disciplines of the University of Rostock are involved:

• Historical scienctists interrelate a database for Mecklenburg census of 1819 in the Grand Duchy of Schwerin to Schmettau`s maps and a census of 1867 in the Grand Duchy of Schwerin on the first topographic maps of the Prussian surveying and mapping.

• Settlement planners and experts for preservation of monuments dedicate themselves to the investigation of village forms, e.g. parish forms and farmyard types. For the region a canon of typical, representative and satisfactory phenomena (local forms and their stages of development) should be derived and prepared for a systematic and appropriate generalization.

• Landscape ecologists, dealing with the analysis of areal distribution, severity and location of the woodland and marshland in Mecklenburg over time, try to edit and create a basis for large-scale analysis of the structure (biodiversity) and function (humus storage) of forests and moor.

• Landscape planners study the implication of the historical-genetic cultural landscape development in the tools of today's spatial planning and management of historic landscape features. The dynamics of land changes is an important basis for defining sustainable models and general principles for spatial planning and regional policy.

• Hydrologists generate hydro-meteorological and hydrological relevant basic parameters for further analysis in the cultural landscape, such as for grass reference evapotranspiration, the climatic water balance, the expansion of drainage systems and water development. This will create the basis for the coupling with model-applications (e.g. water and nitrogen balance models).

• Geodesists and geomorphologists investigate the kettle holes, hollow forms (Sölle), caused by melting out of an enclosed sediment block and distributed especially in the younger Pleistocene areas. In Mecklenburg-Pomerania about 90,000 hollow forms occur, nevertheless their form of origin and development is under discussion.

• The spatial-temporal analysis of the development of habitat fragments, the analysis of the spatial distribution pattern of these kettle holes in their historical development, the floristic inventory of selected hollow forms particularly is of interest to biologists. The comparison with existing historical data and the analysis of the relationship between landscape dynamics (eg reduction in the number of kettle holes) and floristic composition of plant communities in kettle holes may allow to derive long-term preservation strategies of species-rich communities in kettle holes.

The laboratory VKLandLab may be visited and further detail be found under:

www.vklandlab.uni-rostock.de

Contact:

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ralf Bill
Rostock University
Chair of Geodesy and Geoinformatics
18051 Rostock
E-Mail senden

The project is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) within the funding “Virtual Research Laboratories Programme” (support code Bi 467/21-1).