Mapping War Geoheritage: Recognising Geomorphological Traces of War

Abstract

Abstract In the topography of war landscapes the remains of war are found in the form of trenches, bombing craters and remnants of war infrastructure. Today war landscapes are “overlaid” by post-war “layers” of cultural landscapes. It requires non-invasive remote-sensing methods, e.g. time series of aerial photographs and high-resolution terrain models (LiDAR digital terrain model) to recognize these landscapes. In the study area on Kras Plateau (SW Slovenia) over one hundred kilometres of World War I trenches are preserved in the NW part of the plateau (app. 72 km2) in the present-day topography and represent tangible war geoheritage. But much of these geoheritage was also lost in post-war periods, e.g. near the village of Vrtojba (SW Slovenia) where in 1917 over 12 km of World War I trenches existed, but a century later no traces of war are visible in the present-day topography. Almost two hundred World War I bomb craters also existed around the village that are also not existent in the topography any more. Many anthropo-geomorphological traces of war are thus preserved only virtually and present intangible war geoheritage.