Module 2: Land Use\Land Cover

 Module 2: Land Use\Land Cover

In this weeks assignment it was about learning how to interpret a map with using Land Use\Land Cover (LULC) classification criteria. 

LULC is important to learn because humans have been changing the landscape throughout time. Being able to look at an image and know how the area is being occupied throughout history for planning purposes. The image I was looking at was in Pascagoula, Mississippi. This area is constantly changing either by new people coming into the area for jobs or wetlands slowly going away through time. Many cities are planning different things such as making roads bigger. If the area did not have a lot residents the traffic would not be bad and not necessary for the roads to change. As you can see in the image below there are a lot of residents and it is likely the roads will need to change to help with the flow of traffic.

Another portion of LULC is doing the ground truth of the area. In order to make sure what the map is representing you can look at different areas on the map. It would take too much time to do the whole area. Being able to do sporadic testing across the whole map is important because it makes sure one area is not the main focus. Also, it is harder to get to other areas such as the wetlands on the left side of the image. This could be "ground truthed" by looking at the National Wetland Inventory (NWI) on there website. The only other way would be through getting on a boat to make sure it is correct.

LULC does give the GIS analyst time to understand the landscape and make sure they take their time to interpret the map. Also, it is important to note that the image is a snapshot of the area and can constantly be changing. Even though I had 80 percent accuracy, which is good, the image was older and some of my areas changed because of residential expansion and not because the area was incorrect.