#MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPE SOFTWARE#

Several of the questions they pose in their research agenda may be a good fit with repeat photography methodology. Chief among these is Future Earth, a research platform committed to international engagement around global sustainability ( Future Earth 2014b). Today many research groups recognize the importance of an interdisciplinary approach in attempting to observe, understand, and explain some of the interactions of Earth systems.

#MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPE SOFTWARE#

Using examples from our own rephotographic work in the mountains of western Canada, we introduce the Image Analysis Toolkit (IAT), software designed by MLP to assist with visualizing, annotating, and quantitatively describing changes and similarities between photographs. The article gives a sampling of the wide range of studies from many different disciplines that have successfully used repeat photography methodology in scholarly inquiry. In this article we draw on 20 years of experience rephotographing historic Canadian mountain images for the Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) to show that repeat photography can be a critical interdisciplinary method for observing and attributing change in mountain environments. The IAT is at the beginning of its software life cycle and will continue to develop features required by those who use repeat photography to discover change in mountain environments.

All images and software are under Creative Commons copyright and are open access for noncommercial use via the Mountain Legacy Explorer website. The examples presented here utilize MLP image pairs, but the toolkit is designed to be used by anyone with their own comparative images as well as those in the MLP collection. The toolkit is based on insights from recent research on repeat photography and features the following: user-controlled ability to compare, overlay, classify, scale, fade, draw, and annotate images production of comparative statistics on user-defined categories (eg percentage of ice cover change in each image pair) and different ways to visualize change in the image pairs.

We go on to introduce the Image Analysis Toolkit (IAT), which provides interactive comparative image visualization and analytics for a wide variety of ecological, geological, fluvial, and human phenomena.

In this article we suggest that repeat photography would fit well within the Future Earth research agenda. The resulting image pairs are analyzed, catalogued, and made available for further research into landscape changes. With access to upwards of 120,000 systematic glass plate negatives from Canada's mountain west, the MLP field teams seek to stand where historic surveyors stood and accurately reshoot these images. Since 1996, Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) researchers have been exploring change in Canada's mountain environments through the use of systematic repeat photography.

Mountain landscape