Abstract

Land Use Quantification using High Resolution Satellite Imagery
Track: Imagery
Authors: Jovin Lwehabura

Located in the northwest of Joshua Tree National Park(JTNP), Morongo Basin consists of small developing towns, such as Morongo Valley, Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree Village and Twentynine Palms.Land development in the basin is growing where new settlements, commercial and industrial buildings, social services and utility networks have been built extensively.Development creates opportunity for employment and increases the revenue for local government, thus improving services to the people.Despite these direct benefits, planning and implementation of land development in Morongo Basin lack a clear quantification of how much land has been developed, how much land had been disturbed and then abandoned, and how much land has been left unaltered with no negative impact.This study aims to quantify land use in Morongo Basin using the Feature Analyst within the ArcGIS suite.Different imagery classification methods, such as supervised classification method will be used with high resolution satellite imagery(1foot NAID).The final output will helpJTNPcommunicatewithpublicandlocalgovernmentwheretomake landdevelopmenttopreservedessertecosystem.