Module 2 - Land Use/Land Cover, Ground Truthing, and Accuracy Assessment

    This week, in the second Photo Interpretation and Remote Sensing lab, was about Land use/Land cover, Ground Truthing, and accuracy assessment. 

    To start, the first part of the lab concerned land use and land cover. This is where we go in and make classification areas aerially of land and what we believe them to be. As you can see on the map below, this can be anything from residential, to marshland, to commercial, and everything in-between. For most of this lab part, it was mostly making the polygon areas. Unlike Intro to GIS, we did not make our own polygons or points often, however in this class we do. Once the base map was placed, I classified each area as best I could, as well as clipping and making sure no polygons overlapped. 

    With the first part done, then we moved on to ground truthing and accuracy assessment. With this part we used a tool in ArcGIS to place points randomly, and then do ground truthing to see if our land use land cover classifications are correct. Once the points were plotted, we used google maps street view in order to find and check if our points were correct. As you can see below, the green dots are the points that are true in their classifications, while the red is false. Lastly was the accuracy assessment, with the points I had the calculations done. I reached an accuracy assessment of 83%. Although my data was skewed more towards residential areas with the random point tool, I think it is a fair assessment of the points. However, if I am wrong in my assessment, I would like feedback in order to perform the calculations better. 

    With this lab, I felt like I have a bit more clear grasp on how exactly to utilize remote sensing. 



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