Mod 2: Land Use/Land Cover and Ground Truthing

 This week we learned about Land Use Land Cover analysis and creation. Ground Truthing was an added topic as it is important to confirm whether your data is correct, it acts as a process of validating your remote sensing data and analysis. While there are a few different ways to perform this, we used accuracy verification to assess whether the classification we applied to the aerial was correct. The way I completed this task was by creating an extent in which ArcGIS could create random points within my map, then I took those few points and went to that place using GoogleEarth Street View to determine whether the area was what I classified it as. While I did have a 90% accuracy rating with the 30 points, I still feel as though the method of which I created each polygon didn't exactly match up with the edges of the feature I was trying to classify. I do believe this was due to my inexperience with the polygon tool in terms of trying to accurately define natural curves and topography but that could also be the perfectionist in me. In the image below you can see my final map of Pascagoula, Mississippi after hours of creating polygons by hand and making sure they snapped together and had no gaps or overlaps. The different colored and labeled polygons represent different features within the image based on the classification system used which can be determined by the legend. The points represent the ground truthing accuracy assessment that I mentioned earlier where green represents accurate and red represents inaccurate.