GIS 4035 - Remote Sensing & Photo Interpretation - Student Spotlight

Module 3 - Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) Classification 

For Week 4 in GIS 4043, students were instructed to locate and identify features using Google Maps street view, construct an unbiased sampling system, and calculate the accuracy of Land Use/Land Cover classification maps.  

The blog postings for Week 4 illustrated that a number of students had a good understanding of how to conduct an accuracy assessment on a LULC classification. However, this week, we would especially like to highlight Daniela Sabillion!

Her blog post is easy to understand, provides an excellent overview of the accuracy assessment techniques learned in this week's Module, and demonstrates a high level of understanding of the material. Daniela provides a brief review of the two main types of accuracy assessment: in-situ and ex-situ.  Despite not having the highest accuracy (which has a lot to do with the differences in scale of the imagery vs the scale of the ground truthing), her blog post provides a good description on how she developed a stratified random sample using a fishnet grid created in ArcGIS. In addition to the description, she also provided graphics of both (a) different sampling methods and (b) her table of sampling points with accuracy assessment (yes or no) with notes. These additional graphics greatly assist with interpreting the process she used for conducting the accuracy assessment.  

In addition, her map demonstrates a keen design. It is easy to read, the map elements are extremely well balanced, and the colors she chose make it very easy to distinguish the different LULC classes.  Overall, Daniella's blog posting was very good!