Jennifer's GIS Blog

This week, we performed a land use and land cover classification analysis of an aerial image of Pascagoula, Mississippi. We utilized remote sensing techniques to delineate polygons corresponding to various land use and land cover categories, adhering to the Level 2 classification scheme outlined in the Anderson Classification System. Subsequently, we implemented a stratified random sampling approach to select 30 points for ground-truthing validation. These points were then verified using high-resolution imagery from Google Earth.

Part 1 of Lab 1 required assessing the Tone and texture of various portions of a 1965 aerial image from the USGS provided by the UWF Geodata Center as part of the lab data. While the image could have easily been georeferenced, that was not part of the assignment's requirements, so no geospatial projection information, including north or scale, is included in the result.  Part 2 of the lab required identifying objects by their association, pattern or the shape of their shadow. This image was taken in 1970 from the USGS and again provided by the UWF Geodata center.  Part 3 of the lab compared two images of the UWF campus one true color and one false color, no map was created as part of this exercise. However, different points were compared between the two images. As I was assessing points I realized the two images are from vastly different eras, likely more than 15 years apart.

 My Name is Jennifer Melcher. I have a BA and MA in Anthropology from the University of West Florida. I'm an archaeologist and have taught myself GIS for the last 10 years. I've decided recently to formalize my GIS training by pursuing a GIS certificate.