ISSS608 2016-17 T3 Assign LUO MANDI

VAST Challenge 2017 MC 3

Introduction

Data Preparation

Data Exploration

Final Answer

Visualization Result

Comments

Background

The Boonsong Lekagul Nature Preserve was created twenty five years ago to preserve the habitat of wildlife. It is open to public.
However, the number of a popular local bird, the Rose-crested Blue Pipit, is decreasing significantly.
Mitch Vogel, a post-doc student who was very interested in the plight of the Rose-crested Blue Pipit, wants to study the changes of the terrain and vegetation of the preserve area over the past few years and investigate what is the possible impact to the birds.
Mitch has got some multi-spectral image files of the preserve. He thought they would be very informative to be used to perform some visualization analysis. But he has never dealt with it before. He asked me to help him to solve this problem with my visual analytics knowledge.

Questions

1. Boonsong Lake resides within the preserve and has a length of about 3000 feet (see the Boonsong Lake image file). The image of Boonsong Lake is oriented north-south and is an RGB image (not six channels as in the supplied satellite data). Using the Boonsong Lake image as your guide, analyze and report on the scale and orientation of the supplied satellite images. How much area is covered by a pixel in these images? Please limit your answer to 3 images and 500 words.

2. Identify features you can discern in the Preserve area as captured in the imagery. Focus on image features that you are reasonably confident that you can identify (e.g., a town full of houses may be identified with a high confidence level). Please limit your answer to 6 images and 500 words.

3. There are most likely many features in the images that you cannot identify without additional information about the geography, human activity, and so on. Mitch is interested in changes that are occurring that may provide him with clues to the problems with the Pipit bird. Identify features that change over time in these images, using all channels of the images. Changes may be obvious or subtle, but try not to be distracted by easily explained phenomena like cloud cover. Please limit your answer to 6 images and 750 words.

Data Source

The data is obtained from: http://vacommunity.org/VAST+Challenge+2017+MC3

Applications Used

• JMP
• Tableau
• QGIS

References

• https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/FalseColor/page6.php
• https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/rs-for-urban-land-cover-mapping-and-change-detection-analysis/
• http://www.microimages.com/documentation/TechGuides/81VegIndices.pdf