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LAND COVER
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Study Area
The study area is the seven-county Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (TCMA) of Minnesota, an area of approximately 7700 km2 or 3000 square miles (Figure 1). This area includes a diversity of land cover classes. High and low density urban development characterizes the central portion and several rural land uses such as agricultural fields, grassland, wetlands, and forest are dispersed throughout the surrounding areas. The seven-county area is entirely contained within one Landsat scene at path 27, row 29. |
Figure 1. Thematic Mapper imagery of TCMA and surrounding area on May 18, 1998. | |
Classification Scheme
Table 1: Land use classification scheme for Level I
|
Information Class
|
Description
|
|
Water
|
Permanent
open water, lakes and rivers
|
|
Wetlands
|
Saturated
surfaces, shallow marsh, deep marsh, shrub swamp, spongy covering of
mosses (refers to the non-forested
wetland defined in level II)
|
|
Forest
|
Hardwood,
conifer and mixed forest types (includes forest and the majority of forested
wetland defined in level II)
|
|
Agriculture
|
Includes
non-row, row crop fields and non-cropped bare fields
|
|
Urban
|
Includes
high and low density urban and urban grass
|
| |
Classification Results
The final five-class classification maps are shown in figure 2. The overall accuracies of the classifications are 88.6 and 92.3% for 1991 and 1998, respectively, with Kappa statistics of 85.4 and 90.0%.
Figure 2. Final five-class classification maps | |
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