Mountaintop Removal (MTR) analysis is this weeks theme continuing the Special Topics preparation done last week. The main objective of this week was to create a reclassified raster using a combination of ERDAS Imagine and ArcMAP ultimately depicting user defined areas of suspected MTR. Recall that the overall study area was divided into groups. I am a part of group three and you can see the overview of my working area in last weeks post. The area that my group has been assigned is broken down into two landsat rasters. I took one raster as my portion of the assigned work while other members worked with the same or other raster as well. The key element to all of the calculations this week was in visually determining evidence of mountain top removal through unsupervised image classification and reassigning these elements a new value.
This is a screen shot of ongoing work in ArcMAP of the reclassified areas as MTR. The red depicts areas that have been preliminary classified as MTR. Note there are two bulk areas classified as such, those in the lower right appear darkest and are more legitimate examples of MTR. The area to the north west on visual inspection (imagery not available here) more closely resembles an urban build up. Note that the process here was to assign all pixels in the original raster to 1 of 50 different color shades. Then from the color shades taking what stands out as MTR and changing it to red. This change impacts all other pixels of that color shade on the image. So imaging the clearing of a field for planting agriculture, or the build up of an urban area, its easy to see how many of those properties would be similar to land being cleared for mining. This is just one example of how we can end up with other areas being reclassified similarly to actual sites of MTR. The analysis and composition of results will continue next week as we take out some of the key factors from the results above. If I remove areas within proximity to developed roadways in the town in the upper portion of the image likely very few areas of MTR will remain there. That and further work will be done and presented next week. Please stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment