Land Use/Land Cover Classification and Ground Truthing

For Module 2, we utilized the identifying features we learned last week, such as shape/size, color, shadow, pattern, and association, to help locate features in a natural color aerial image and create a land cover/land use map in Pascagoula, MS. Land cover is the biophysical description of the Earth's surface. Land use is how humans interact with the landscape and therefore change it. I used Level I and Level II classification scheme to create codes for different features I found. There are 9 Level I classes and I used 6 of them: Water, Urban, Agricultural, Wetland, Barren Land, and Forest Land. The trickiest part of this lab was getting comfortable creating polygons and editing the vertices in a way to keep overlap at a minimal.For the ground truthing calculation, I created 30 random sample points by distributing them as evenly as possible across the map. Then, I utilized Google Maps street view to check the accuracy of each point to polygon. In the shapefile attribute table, I used Yes or No to confirm the accuracy.