A. Starling's GIS Blog

  Lab 2 this week in Photo Interpretation and Remote Sensing involved using the provided aerial raster image of Pascagoula, Mississippi area to utilize what we’ve learned so far to determine Land Use and Land Cover (LULC), classifying with the Anderson Classification System (USGS). We started by creating a polygon shapefile (“LULC”), ensuring to add two text fields for the Code and Code Description. Once that was created, we identified areas that would fit into Level I Classification, and then further determined the Level II Classification. A lot of polygons were digitized to indicate the different land use and land cover areas as shown below in my map (Figure 1).   I also ended up making two Feature Class files (“WaterBodies”, “Water2”) to use the Trace tool in the Create Features pane to mark the larger bodies of water that I considered Lakes, as well as to mark the Streams and Canals. Figure 1: Land Use and Land Cover of the Pascagoula, MS area Quick note here – while white...

       This week in Photo Interpretation and Remote Sensing , we took a dive into Lab 1 and used what we learned through readings and lecture to determine the Tone (lightness vs. darkness of an area), Texture (the amount of change over a small area in tone/color), as well as much more.      First we started this lab by creating a New Feature Class, choosing Polygon as the geometry, and making sure to add Name as a new field with the Text data type – we’ll be able to name our polygons in the Attribute Table by doing this. Map 1 (below) indicates the areas of Tone (in orange) that I felt best described the areas I would consider Very Dark, Dark, Medium, Light, and Very Light within the provided aerial image.      I repeated this process to determine the Texture of areas (in green) I felt were best described as Very Coarse, Coarse, Mottled, Fine, and Very Fine. In this particular aerial image, the neighborhoods seemed to be the most co...

Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) intended to build a transmission line that traveled through Manatee and Sarasota Counties in Florida and started making their determination on the placement in 2006. They wanted, of course, to implement the transmission line in an area that would be least affected. The objectives were to place it in an area that least affected environmentally sensitive lands, homes and land owners, as well as the schools in the area. Too through this project, we elected to determine the total cost of the transmission line. Did FPL hit these objectives? Click the below Presentation and Project Presentation Transcript links to discover what came from this Final Project!  Transcript Bobwhite-Manatee Transmission Line Presentation  

University of West Florida campus georeferenced maps indicating UWF Gym (Bldg. 072) and Campus Lane road, as well as the location & buffer zone of a protected eagles nest.  Module 6 focused on how to georeference. The goal initially for this lab was to create common points between the known (in this case, Building & Road feature classes) and unknown (raster image(s), or the University of West Florida campus maps-). We started by working with University of West Florida campus maps – one for the north campus, and a separate south campus map. This allowed us the opportunity to figure out how to piece together relatively simply two separate maps with a known layer ( Buildings layer and Road layer) Choosing the Control Points wasn’t too difficult once I got started and took time to examine the map(s). While I kept the UWF North map in the First Order Polynomial transformation, I felt like the UWF South map was best aligned in the Second Order Polynomial transformation. Af...