A historical geospatial database of the island of Cyprus in the 1960s

Historical data on land cover/use and road networks are important not only for cultural heritage preservation in the context of digital humanities, but also for understanding the evolution of landscapes and human infrastructures aimed at efficient management of land systems. In this manuscript, we present a spatial database that contains basic background layers of the island of Cyprus in the 1960s. These data are derived from the topographic map of Cyprus produced in the 1960s and published in 1969. They were acquired after the digitization of the K715 map series (1:50,000) of the Corps of Engineers of the U.S. Army Map Service (hereafter "K715 map") [1]. The database consists of the following vector layers: a) land use/land cover, b) road network, c) coastline, d) settlements, and covers the entire area of the island (9,251 km2). The road network is divided into six categories and the land use/land cover into thirty-three different types according to the legend of the original map. In addition, the 1960 census was included in the database to assign population data to settlement entities (towns or villages). This census was the last census of the total population under the same authority and method, since Cyprus was divided into two parts five years after the map was published and as a result of the Turkish invasion. Therefore, the dataset can be used not only for cultural and historical preservation purposes, but also to measure the different development of the landscapes that fell under a different political status since 1974.