Photo Interpretation and Remote Sensing - Manual Land Use/Land Cover Assessment

Digitized polygons classified by land use or land cover.

For this module we each classified land use and land cover from an aerial photograph for a portion of Pascagoula, Mississippi. We were encouraged to classify land cover and land use down to a Level II classification, which included delineations such as Residential, Commercial, Evergreen Forest, Bays and Estuaries, but did not specify further to type of home, species of tree, use of waterway etc. 

In this exercise I used the photo interpretation techniques from the previous lab to make determinations on structures, vegetation, and feature boundaries. I determined an appropriate minimum mapping unit (MMU), digitized polygons based on my interpretation, and then conducted an accuracy analysis by comparing 30 randomly sampled points to the features at those locations in Google Maps/Streetview. Of 30 sampling points, only 2 were incorrectly classified, for an estimated accuracy of 93%.