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From paper to pixels - digitized maps of vascular plant distributions in Denmark in the early 20th century
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  • Published: 24 March 2026

From paper to pixels - digitized maps of vascular plant distributions in Denmark in the early 20th century

  • Ditte Marie Christiansen1,
  • Matilda Arnell2,
  • Conny Bruun Asmussen Lange1,
  • Tankred Ott3,
  • Hans Henrik Bruun4 na1 &
  • …
  • Sergey Rosbakh1 na1 

Scientific Data , Article number:  (2026) Cite this article

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We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.

Abstract

Historic data are essential for quantifying changes in biodiversity and their drivers. Much legacy data remains undigitized in archives, such as natural history museums, representing untapped resources for assessing past biodiversity patterns. In 1904, the first systematic survey of species distributions of the entire Danish vascular flora was initiated. Field surveys were essentially conducted in the early decades of the 20th century. Results were published as black and white printed maps (1931–1976). We used automated georeferencing and image classification to extract data from all published maps. We present 1340 historic distribution maps of vascular plant species, subspecies and varieties in Denmark at 10 × 10 km resolution. These maps represent the Danish flora of native and archaeophyte species known at the time, except a dozen ubiquitous native species. By comparison with modern distribution data, long-term increases and declines can be accurately quantified, contributing to large-scale analysis of national, European or global plant diversity changes in the modern era.

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Data availability

The vector maps and the georeferenced TIFF files of the map images are openly available from the Figshare repository at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30609671.

Code availability

A versioned copy of the code used for digitizing and categorising the historic maps with QGIS, Python and R are available in the Zenodo repository at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17600480.

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Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to the numerous people organising and volunteering in the TBU and AFD surveys. We thank the Danish Botanical Society for initiating and conducting both surveys and giving access to the published maps from their archive. The help by Henrik Ærenlund Pedersen with interpreting Orchidaceae taxonomy from the historic maps to modern taxon circumscription is appreciated. Leonard Blaschek provided valuable help for writing the macro codes for Fiji. Last, we appreciate the efforts of Nanna Marie Christiansen to clean the predicted categories of the historic maps and help with aligning taxonomy. This work received the financial support provided by the NovoNordisk Foundation (SR’s starting grant NNF22OC0078703).

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Hans Henrik Bruun, Sergey Rosbakh.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg C, Denmark

    Ditte Marie Christiansen, Conny Bruun Asmussen Lange & Sergey Rosbakh

  2. Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Matilda Arnell

  3. Novo Nordisk A/S, Bagsværd, Denmark

    Tankred Ott

  4. Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Ø, Denmark

    Hans Henrik Bruun

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  1. Ditte Marie Christiansen
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Contributions

H.H.B., C.L. and S.R. conceived the idea and D.M.C. developed it. D.M.C. digitized and georeferenced the maps with help from M.A. D.M.C. and T.O. extracted the occupancy symbols on the maps and assigned them to vector grids. D.M.C. aligned the taxonomy with help from H.H.B. and C.L. D.M.C. led the writing of the manuscript and produced all figures with input from all authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ditte Marie Christiansen.

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Christiansen, D.M., Arnell, M., Lange, C.B.A. et al. From paper to pixels - digitized maps of vascular plant distributions in Denmark in the early 20th century. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07064-y

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  • Received: 17 November 2025

  • Accepted: 11 March 2026

  • Published: 24 March 2026

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07064-y

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