Determining Land Cover Classification for the St. Louis River Watershed

Learning Unit Description: 

The Integrated Geospatial Education and Technology Training (iGETT) presents a series of Learning Units (LU) designed to incorporate federal land remote sensing data into Geographic Information Systems (GIS) instruction. The Classifying Land Cover in Minnesota and Wisconsin LU, created by Elizabeth Sedgwick, uses the St. Louis River watershed in (the second largest tributary to Lake Superior), to develop a land cover map using Landsat imagery and instructor-provided shapefiles. In this eight-part exercise, students work their way through an in-depth procedure of image processing and classification in order to create a land cover map of the St. Louis River watershed, that can be later utilized in future comparative activities. 

The iGETT Learning Units amount to about two weeks of instruction and are designed for use both as "skills-based case studies and building blocks for new courses." All LUs are intended for students with a basic understanding of GIS. Each LU includes three core documents, an instructor's guide, a student guide, and a curriculum support document, as well as the remote sensing data needed to complete the unit. Completion of the entire exercise should take about twelve hours, divided up over several class periods. 

Upon completion of the lessons, students should be able to complete preprocessing steps to convert raw digital numbers to reflectance, mosaic and subset images to a region of interest, perform an unsupervised classification and combine classes to create a meaningful representation of the geographic area, and use their final output to develop a map that graphically and textually details their work. 

For orientation purposes, viewers should begin with Sedgwick_Thumbnail.pdf, which offers a description of the LU as well as an overview of topics covered, required software, and the intended audience.

Lesson Contents: 

The attached files associated with this LU exist in a variety of formats and a variety of geospatial data file types.

Below is a list of the files contained within the .zip attachment. The size of each file is included in parenthesis.

LU_Sedg.zip

• Documents
  • Sedgewick_IG_Final.pdf (3.3 MB)
  • Sedgwick_SH_Final.pdf (8.2 MB)
  • Sedgwick_SH_Suppl_1_Final.pdf (183 KB)
  • Sedgwick_SH_Suppl_2_Final.pdf (126 KB)
  • Sedgwick_Thumbnail.pdf (168 KB)
• Data
  • Sedgwick_LU_Data1
    • LT50270272003248LGS01.tar.gz​ (124.3 MB)
    • StLouisRiverWtsh
      • StLRivWtshExtent.shx (173 bytes)
      • StLRivWtshExtent.shp.xml (155 KB)
      • StLRivWtshExtent.shp (173 bytes)
      • StLRivWtshExtent.sbx (424 bytes)
      • StLRivWtshExtent.sbn (132 bytes)
      • StLRivWtshExtent.prj (116 bytes)
      • StLRivWtshExtent.dbf (154 KB)
      • StLRivWtshExtent_.evf (11 KB)
      • ​​StLRivWtshExtent_.dbf (108 bytes)
  • Sedgwick_LU_Data2
    • LT50270282003248LGS01.tar.gz (138.3 MB)