GIS and Remote Sensing in Land Cover, Land Change Analysis

INTRODUCTION

Land use and land cover change has become a central component in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes. The advancement in the concept of vegetation mapping has greatly increased research on land use land cover change thus providing an accurate evaluation of the spread and health of the world’s forest, grassland, and agricultural resources has become an important priority. Viewing the Earth from space is now crucial to the understanding of the influence of man’s activities on his natural resource base over time. In situations of rapid and often unrecorded land use change, observations of the earth from space provide objective information of human utilization of the landscape. Over the past years, data from Earth sensing satellites has become vital in mapping the Earth’s features and infrastructures, managing natural resources and studying environmental change. Participants will therefore acquire hands-on skills in use of Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing as a tool to capture, store, analyze, manage, and visualize land cover/use change and analysis.

DURATION

5 Days

COURSE OBJECTIVES

• To introduce general and advanced GIS and Remote Sensing in land use/ cover changes.
• To expose participants to Digital Image Processing with more emphasis on classification.
• To demonstrate case study of a selected regions using remote sensing software.
• To develop a sound basis for understanding the operation of GIS and Remote Sensing in Land use/cover change

COURSE OUTLINE

Module1:

Information

• Introduction to GIS and Remote Sensing in land use/cover change
• Land cover/use change concepts and frameworks
• Drivers of land cover/use change
• Classification System for the Mapping of Land Use and Land Cover
• GIS project design and interpretation
• GIS and Remote Sensing data used for land use/cover change
• Understanding Sensor/Platform Systems for remote sensed data
• Exercise I: Handling spatial information I :( Using Quantum GIS Software and SAGA GIS).

Module 2:

GIS data sources, data collection and integration techniques for DRM

• Geo database Creation
• Satellite image data sources for land use land cover.
• Task I: GPS/mobile phone GPS for land use land cover data collection using Open Data Kit (ODK).
• Activity: GPS/mobile Course Tour.
• Exercise II: Handling spatial information II: GPS, GIS Integration using GIS/RS software.
• GIS and RS for identification of extent of land use land cover
• Land use and land cover mapping

Module 3:

Pre-processing land cover land use image 

• Radiometric and geometric image correction
• Temporal normalization
• Imagery Geo-coding and geo-referencing
• Image enhancement
• Thermal bands for use in land cover classification

Land use/cover classification

• Signature development
• Supervised Classification
• Unsupervised Classification
• Classification Accuracy assessment
• Change detection
• Determining Change in Specific Land Cover Types
• Multi -criteria analysis for land use suitability site selection

Module 4:

Assessment of land use land cover

• Assessment of spatial distribution of land resources
• Monitoring of infrastructure
• Monitoring dynamic changes in urban growth
• Trend Analysis for Land use
• Cluster analysis
• Terrain analysis
• Cost benefit analysis
• Modeling and simulating land use

Module 5:

Online Publishing of maps and GIS output

• Working with Google Maps and Fusion Table
• Publishing into other web based platforms