 and other important resources claimed by the villagers, as well as a selection of unused mires. About 40% of the study area was included in this map. The first document focusing on our study area, the taxation map of Abborrtjärn, is from 1805 (Figure 2b), where the new village was formally recognized. Here, all units of arable land and meadows were assessed and graded according to an elaborate method (Björck, 1851: 531–533). For each meadow, a drawing was provided as well as the area and an estimated yield in weight. The area covered by this map was much smaller than the study area, but almost all of the mire meadows of the 1805 map were also included in the enclosure map from 1880.
To explore more recent conditions, we used data sets gathered for other studies with modern remote-sensing methods and made available through the Krycklan Catchment. Land cover in 1963 (Figure 2f) and 2013 (Figure 2h) had been classified from aerial photographs by a well-trained analyst from the Swedish National Forest Inventory (NFI), who defined polygons and classified them into standard land classes (Hasselquist et al., 2019). Also, most of the ditches of the area had been mapped and quantified using a 0.5 × 0.5 m digital terrain model (DTM) derived from a LiDAR flight from 2015 (Hasselquist et al., 2018). In both cases, the existing data sets were reused, but also slightly expanded with more data from the same sources because a small part of the study area had not been covered by the previous studies.
It is common practice to divide mires into bogs and fens, bogs receiving water only from precipitation and therefore being extremely nutrient-poor, whereas fens receive water that has been in contact with mineral soil and therefore has a higher content of minerals (Gunnarsson and Löfroth, 2014). However, as our study is based on both historical sources and current land-cover classification where this distinction is not followed, we have chosen to treat mires as one entity.
The entire study area had been mapped in great detail during the process of enclosure in 1880, so that map was used to define the total mire area of the study as the sum of all unused mires, mire meadows, and peat pits. Unused mires were delimited with orange lines on the map (Figure 2c), and in the tables they were usually classified as ‘myra’, sometimes as ‘mosse’, ‘myrsly’, ‘myrländig’, ‘myrhals’ or any of a few other Swedish terms for different kinds of mires. Mire meadows were not as easily defined, because all kinds of meadows were delimited with green lines on the map and called ‘äng’. Therefore, we distinguished mire meadows from meadows on mineral soil through their location. Usually this was evident from the map tables, where mire meadows were located inside areas with names ending with ‘-myran’ (i.e., ‘the mire’ in the form typical of the dialects of northern Sweden). However, there were a few cases where such labels were absent, thus, we judged these as mire meadows or not based on their appearance on both historical and modern maps, as well as on aerial photographs. As for the peat pit, only one such area existed, and it was delimited by an orange line and unequivocally labeled ‘peat and moss pit’ (sw. ‘torf och måssetag’) on the map, and ‘mire pit’ (sw. ‘myrtag’) in the tables.
As to the other maps used in the study, the definition of mires and mire meadows was straightforward. On the map from 1702, each mire meadow was noted as ‘myrewald’ in the table, whereas a few other mires were roughly outlined on the map. The 1785 map contained two classes of mire; first the mire meadows, described as ‘meadows rendering sparse and less rewarding sedge hay on swampy and wet mires’ (sw. ‘slåtter gifva glest och mindre bördigt starrhö på sanka och våtländta myror’), second, the unused mires, ‘bogs, partly treeless, partly with small pine trees’ (sw. ‘måssar dels skoglöse dels med små tall beväxte’). In the map from 1805, hay harvested from mires was clearly defined as ‘mire hay’ (sw. ‘myrhö’), and the related areas were represented as drawings showing mires, so the class