Module 2a Lab: Land Use / Land Cover Classification and Module 2b Lab: Ground Truthing and Accuracy Assessment

 Module 2a Lab: Land Use / Land Cover Classification 

For this week’s lab, we were introduced to Land Use / Land Cover Classification and Ground Truthing and Accuracy Assessment. The task is to create a map classifying land in Pascagoula, MS and afterward to ground truth the points. This area has an assortment of land types and makes for learning how to classify, although not hard it is detail-oriented and a lot of fun. In the first part of the lab, I created and added a new polygon feature class called LULC. In the new feature, I created polygons for each of the classifications in Pascagoula. After creating the polygons, labels were added, and the symbology was changed to unique values. Overall I created eight level-one codes with level-two classification, see table below. 

Module 2b Lab: Ground Truthing and Accuracy Assessment

The second part of the lab involved creating 30 points and then ground truthing those locations in Google Maps, I used Google Earth. After creating a new feature class for ground truthing I used the Create Random Points tool to generate 30 points. I used the Coordinate Conversion tool to export the random point coordinates as a kmz file. Once the file was exported I loaded it into Google Earth and was able to search each coordinate to “truth” the points compared to the random points in ArcGIS. When compared to the random points 6 of the 30 were inaccurate (wrong) from Google Earth. The accuracy assessment was 80%: 24 with “YES” correlation and 6 with “NO” correlation.

The map has an underlying image I used to create polygons of each of the classifications. The codes are based on USGS Level II. There was more that could be classified in the image but due to time constraints these were the ones that summed up the area of Pascagoula quite well.