Automated backdating of transportation networks with Landsat imagery

Unfortunately, many GIS layers depicting transportation networks do not provide information on the construction year of each line segment in the network. This poses a serious problem when the GIS layer is used as input to historic analyses investigating the growth of the human footprint in an area still being developed, since there is no way of finding out what features already existed at each time lag of the period under analysis. Here we assess the possibility of backdating (a.k.a. retro-fitting) a road network to a reference year (by removing features in the GIS layer whose ground counterparts were not yet built then), using (1) a single Landsat image from the reference year (single date approach); and (2) the latter plus another from a more recent year (multi-date approach). We provide succinct information on the study area, input RS and GIS data, methods, and results; and conclude that full automation of this task is feasible.