Remote Sensing: Module 3 - Land Use Land Cover Classification

Introduction to land use versus land cover

     The focus of the project this week is to identify and classify different land uses and land cover types. This exercise builds upon last week's work with recognition elements. It provides an introduction to another use of aerial photography: assessing natural and urban resources. There are several different classification systems and their usefulness depends upon the scale of the research question or goal of the project. This exercise referenced the USGS Standard Land Use/Land Cover Classification System up to Level II (and for a few instances, Level III).
     Tasks for this lab included deciding upon a scale to use,  generating a visual standard using recognition elements (to ensure uniformity and consistency), and digitizing features by use or cover type up to Level II classifications. [A more practiced eye will no doubt find error in my classifications but bear in mind that we were only asked to spend up to 4 hours as we will be revisiting this map in a later exercise.]
     The map deliverable is shown below. This area (Pascagoula, MS) is largely dominated by urban/built up land and to a lesser extent water with forest land. I was able to identify commercial areas, industrial areas, main roads, and public/private service areas (like schools, cemeteries). I used the same ArcGIS tools as last week to digitize these features and modify their attributes in the attribute table. It was easy to get lost in this assignment. Once you start to really recognize features it became hard not to classify every minute change in land use/land cover.

Map 1: Land Use/Land Cover Classification Exercise  

As a personal aside, I flew back from Washington earlier this week and was able to get live practice at identifying land use and land cover. I played a sort of I Spy and saw agricultural areas, pastoral land, small towns, the airport (obviously), and mountain ranges to name a few things. At any rate, I had a GIS/carto nerd moment.