Virginia Tech GIS and Remote Sensing Research Symposium

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Browsing Virginia Tech GIS and Remote Sensing Research Symposium by Subject "Aerial photography"

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    Accuracy Assessment of the National Land Cover Database Impervious Surface dataset for Roanoke, Virginia
    Parece, Tammy E.; Campbell, James B. Jr. (2014)
    The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC) developed National Land Cover Database Impervious Surface (NLCD IS) data to identify percent developed imperviousness for the coterminous USA. We present the results of an accuracy assessment on this data for the City of Roanoke, Virginia. First, we performed a classic accuracy assessment using a set of random points generated by GIS, and high resolution aerial photographs (1/2 foot resolution), varying the NLCD IS’ percent imperviousness from 10% to 75% per cell, resulting in an overall accuracy of around 70% for most thresholds. Then a polygon impervious surface dataset was delineated in GIS using the same high resolution aerial photos, and subsequently subdivided into 30 meter by 30 meter pixels matching each cell boundary of the NLCD IS data. A second accuracy assessment was performed on a cell by cell basis, comparing the NLCD IS to this newly created impervious surface dataset. Finally, terrain relief, specifically percent slope created from a 30 meter digital elevation model, was added to the analysis to determine if it impacted the accuracy of the NLCD IS data in the cell by cell assessment.
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    Accuracy Assessment of the NLCD 2006 Impervious Surface for Roanoke and Blacksburg
    Zhao, Suwen; Feng, Leyang; Shao, Yang; Dymond, Randel L. (2014)
    Impervious surface map products are important for the study of urbanization, urban heat island effects, watershed hydrology, water pollution, and ecosystem services in general. At the conterminous US scale, impervious surfaces are mapped for 2001 and 2006. The accuracy of the 2006 NLCD impervious surface, however, has not been thoroughly examined, especially for small and intermediate size cities (e.g., regional city). In this study, we selected two transects in two cities and visually interpreted aerial photo to develop impervious surface reference maps. We then compared percent impervious surface of the NLCD and aerial photo-interpreted reference maps. The comparison was conducted at 90m resolution to minimize the errors in image registration. Overall, we found that the 2006 NLCD impervious surface matched well with our reference data, although slight skewness at two extremes is present. The R² and RMSE statistics improved when the two datasets are compared at coarse aggregation levels (e.g. 180m).