A dataset of aerial photographs of 1972 from an irrigated area in Monegros, Spain

Abstract

Our dataset contains the scans of 278 paper prints of contacts from a photogrammetric flight of 1972, plus a diagram for the relative location of each of the photograms. The paper prints served three years later, i.e. in 1975, for studying the soils of an irrigated district. The entire flight covered about 705 km², in the semiarid Central Ebro Basin, at the province of Huesca, Spain. The flight encompasses the 359 km²-irrigated district fed by the sections 2^nd and 3^rd of the first part of the Canal of Monegros, plus the westward conterminous non-irrigated lands until the border with the province of Zaragoza (Fig. 1). The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture throughout its now extinct branch Institute for Agrarian Reform and Development, i.e. IRYDA by its Spanish acronym, contracted a consulting company to produce a report [1] about the location of saline and non-saline soils of the district in 1975. The soil surveyors used the paper prints for preparing the report and marked some of the prints with color wax-pencil. Most of these marks locate the sampled sites but also appear geographical names, schematic highlights of some terrain features, and mentions to ongoing land levelling or similar works.

Keywords: Aridity; Ebro river basin; Huesca; IRYDA; Irrigation; Salinity; Soil.