Habitat destruction and degradation represent serious threats to biodiversity, and quantification of land-use change over time is important for understanding the consequences of these changes to organisms and ecosystem service provision.

Historical land-use maps are important for documenting how habitat cover has changed over time, but digitizing these maps is a time consuming process. HistMapR is an R package designed to speed up the digitization process, and in this video we take an example map to show you how the method works.

Digitization is fast, and agreement with manually digitized maps of around 80–90% meets common targets for image classification. We hope that the ability to quickly classify large areas of historical land use will promote the inclusion of land-use change into analyses of biodiversity, species distributions and ecosystem services.

This video is based on the Applications article ‘HistMapR: Rapid digitization of historical land-use maps in R‘ by Auffret et al. This article is freely available to anyone (no subscription required).

The package is hosted on GitHub and example scripts can be downloaded from Figshare.