Module 3 - Remote Sensing - Land Use and Land Cover Classification

Map of USGS Level II Land Use and Land Cover,
 Pascagoula, Mississippi

In this week's Remote Sensing lab, we began to gain experience in interpreting land cover and land use from aerial photographs, as well as digitizing land use and land cover features onto a map.  The learning curve was steep for me at the beginning, because I had to wade through some inefficient methods and repair a lot of errors before I could really start to make progress.  All in all, this exercise was very educational!

This map has been classified and digitized according to USGS Level II of land use and land cover classes (Level I is very general, while level IV, the highest, is most detailed). The main challenge at Level II is learning to generalize, while still identifying the major subclasses. Features that can be discerned from the entire extent of the map must be identified. At Level I, there would only be 4 classes on this map: Urban, Forest Land, Water and Wetland.  At Level II, we divide up those very broad classes somewhat, as shown by the map legend directly to the left; for example, the Urban Level I class includes Residential, Commercial and Services, Industrial, and Transportation at Level II.