GIS5027 Module 2: Land Use/Land Cover & Ground Truthing

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If I had one word to describe Module 2's lab, it would be "restraint".

Restraint because I needed to restrain myself from being a perfectionist and trying to fix every little thing I catch. I can get lost in the weeds and not see the whole forest for the trees, so to speak. So, giving myself the room to not digitize as strictly as I would normally proved quite difficult.

Module 2 covered Land Use/Land Cover as well as Ground Truthing of the Pascagoula, Mississippi area. We were provided an aerial to classify the LULC codes over the entire satellite imagery. Not gonna lie, this was pretty daunting. I've never had to do anything like this -- usually it's specific areas like mining or impact areas. So to do the entire tile felt intimidating, but I was up to the challenge.

I made sure to break things up by the larger areas to smaller areas, that way the larger spaces could be accounted for first and I could worry about the finer detailed sections later. Honestly, I dreaded doing the wetlands within the bay area. There were so many water bodies within them or flowing through them. It dampened my spirits to have to trudge through the digitization process in that area in particular.

The second part of the lab covered the verification of our LULC classification, which is called Ground Truthing. We did this by performing an accuracy assessment using supplemental data, specifically Google Maps and its Street View functionality. This allowed us to visit the sample locations without having to actually physically be there. If the sample location proved to be true to our LULC classification code, then we were accurate. Thankfully, of the 30 sample locations I created using a stratified random protocol, my results showed an 80% accuracy. I was good on identifying water bodies, but when it came to 7) Barren Land, I mis-identified all of the areas that I thought were Barren Land.

Overall, it was a very insightful and fun lab despite how monotonous it got when digitizing.

Screenshot of the Module 2 map I created of Pascagoula Land Use/Land Cover Classification and Ground Truthing Accuracy Assessment.

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