Friday, February 1, 2013

High-Resolution Land Cover for the Greater Fairfax, VA Region

In collaboration with our friends at Casey Trees and Fairfax County we have developed a high-resolution (sub-meter) land cover layer for Fairfax County and the surrounding region, including the City of Fairfax, Fort Belvoir, the Town of Vienna, the City of Alexandria, Arlington County, the Town of Herndon, George Mason University, the City of Falls Church, and the Town of Clifton.
Communities mapped as part of this project.
We mapped seven land cover classes from 2011 WorldView-2 imagery and 2008 LiDAR: (1) tree canopy, (2) grass and shrubs, (3) bare soil, (4) water, (5) buildings, (6) roads/railroads, and (7) other paved surfaces.
WorldView-2 imagery (left) and resulting land cover (right)
My understanding is that this is the most comprehensive, accurate, and detailed land cover dataset for the region and will undoubtedly help communities better manage their landscape.  We are currently working with our partners on analyzing the data and will hopefully have it out to the public in a month or so.  Keep in mind that this dataset is not for the faint of heart, there are close to 9.5 billion pixels in it.


3 comments:

Unknown said...

What haven't you mapped at this point?

Diogo said...

Is there any tutorial about how do you do it? Are there rules that we can use?

Thanks

Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne said...

On this blog you will find several posts that contain tutorial videos. We primarily relied on eCognition and Quick Terrain Modeler.