During my 2013 fieldwork in Duhok I came across a tall strange looking tree type that stood out from the others, both from the ground and on satellite images. I was told its name was “Spindar” and that it was used in cellulose production, but nobody could tell me the English or Latin name for…
In a paper I’m working on where I’m classifying cropland in the Duhok governorate I had to mix preprocessed Landsat Surface Reflectance data with some raw scenes that I had to convert to Surface Reflectance using the Dark Object Subtraction (DOS) method (as described in Song et al. 2001). This was because those scenes were…
I will admit that even though I’ve had a few courses on land use/cover classification and accuracy assessments during my Master and PhD, I always get confused about what user and producer accuracy are, and even more so what Kappa is. In trying to assess the accuracy of my phenology based classification of cropland, I…
This joint post developed from several discussions about correlations with (soon to be) Dr Martin Brandt who helped write this post. You will find the same post on his blog, as well as many other interesting posts. Correlations are a very famous and popular way to express relationships (and their strength) between two variables. Applications in environmental sciences span from relations…
Working in a rather mountainous area is interesting but can be a challenge when trying to determine land use through satellite imagery. Cropping land is mainly located in the plains where fields are usually of a larger size, easy to distinguish from surrounding pastures and other area. Orchards, on the other hand, are located in the mountains,…
When conducting a classification of land cover or land use, it’s helpful to have training data that can be used as input in statistical classification algorithms, or simply as a support for yourself. These points can be collected on the ground, by visiting different locations and taking GPS points, which is a rather time, energy…
Today I’ve been calculating Top Of Atmosphere (TOA) reflectance for my Landsat 8 images that I will use in my Object Based classification of landcover. I encountered some problems but also found solutions that I think might be helpful for people like me who don’t really remember the basic trig, and who also fights a…
This week I downloaded an ASTER Digital Elevation Model (DEM) (30 m res) from Earth Explorer to use in my classification of Landcover. My plan is to separate different types of landcover by looking at slope and elevation. I have about 250 ground truth points where I know the landcover, and by grouping the landcover…
This week I finally got access to the eCognition software that I will use for my land cover classification of the Duhok Governorate. It will take some time to master but hopefully I can learn enough to help others with it. It is based on a segmentation and then a classification where classes are assigned…
Since I don’t appreciate processing data, I always try to avoid it as much as possible and one thing that I really want to avoid is radiometric correction of satellite images (it just confuses me). So after downloading a ton of free Landsat images for my study area from Earth Explorer, I didn’t have a…
Population and Environment in the Middle East 