How can I study ground coverage of lawn, non-organic substrate, water bodies etc. and tree cover of small sized urban parks (no larger than 80x80 metres)?
Thank you for your quick reply. Where can I find high-resolution imagery and how high should resolution be (any publicly available source with high enough resolution)? Aim of this work is to measure relative percentages of ground cover types (lawn, concrete, water body and so on). and also to measure tree cover. It doesn't have to be from satellite imagery, any field procedure technique will also do.
As it is mentioned by other previous answer that if you want to study this large scale area it should be better way to use high scale optical image like quickbird imagery surfe this website '' http://glcf.umd.edu/data/quickbird/'' may be you will find some free data. also you could use google map as well to create map of this area. However for field work you are looking for you can use laser scan system it is very good way especially if you have the device you could visit my website and you could find some materials of laser scan. http://falahfakhri.wordpress.com/ OR if you have some projects we could share your project with my university.
Dear Haider and Falah,
Thank you for your interest and caring. It's good to see people are trying to help. I've taken a look at all the sources you guys provided. I will consult my advisor about them. How about image processing? Which software can I use to process the images to determine how much area ground coverage types cover? Thanks again!
Dear Kaan,
I actually did something very similar when I needed to find out habitat use by birds in the Cambridge Botanic Gardens and didn't have the resources for in-depth scanning of the area. I imported satellite images from Google Earth into a GIS program, overlaid a 5 x 5 m grid (and labelled each square) onto the images and then printed several off covering the whole garden. I then went into the field and physically marked down what was in each of the 5 x 5 m grids (you could do some of this from the computer if you just have a water body or grassy area). For more info on the methods see Mackenzie, J.A., Hinsley, S. A. & Harrison, N. M. 2014. Habitat selection by birds breeding in urban habitat and the consequences for fitness. Ibis 156: 591–605. Hope that helps
"How about image processing? Which software can I use to process the images to determine how much area ground coverage types cover?"
For my work with land cover classification, I use Trimble eCognition, but many others use Erdas Imagine or ENVI. There is significant cost associated with all 3, though educational licences are available. Good luck with your study!
Dear Julia,
Sorry for my late reply. Thank you very much for the information. That sounds brilliant and practical =) but I will definitely need some finer resolution since my parks are usually very small. I will see your paper today and contact you if I have any further questions. Thank you very much for taking time to answer my question.
And dear Justin,
You're right =/ Those are some expensive softwares. I will contact my advisor to see if we can get an educational licence. Thank you very much for taking time to write an answer. Good day.
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