ERDAS Imagine & Digital Data Lab

 

This map uses an image imported from ERDAS Imagines and it shows the different features from a snippet of the U.S. landscape and their areas in hectares. 

This lab wasn't too bad. I used ERDAS Imagines in a Remote Sensing lecture and really hated the "pan" tool, but I was able to understand this tool better through this lab and now I actually think it's useful. The image quality is extremely bad, though, because of low resolution and I'm not sure how I could have fixed that or if it is actually supposed to be this bad. That is why the image in the map looks so pixelated. Another concern I had was adding items to the legend. The link provided gave us information on how to change how labels are displayed, not necessarily how to add items to the legend. Usually, I do this by adding fields to Unique Values symbology and then multiple fields show up in the legend. However, I wasn't given an option to add a field in Unique Values this time and I'm not sure why. I manually added the areas from the attribute table and positioned them to look okay. Overall, the lab was pretty informative and gave a decent background on ERDAS Imagines. 

LULC Classification & Ground Truthing Lab

 

This map shows the area of Pascagoula, Mississippi coded into LULC land classifications. Most of this city is made up of water and residential areas. The red and green points are random ground-truthing sample points that were used to calculate the overall accuracy of the land classifications I made. The red points are areas that I misclassified and the green points are the areas I classified correctly. I had 70 percent accuracy for my classifications, which I consider to be very good for my first time doing this.

This was a very time-consuming lab, but it was not difficult. I actually learned a lot of little map-making techniques that I didn't know about before like how to incorporate multiple fields into unique values symbology and edit the labels of the symbols. I also enjoyed learning about the Create Random Points tool. I want to learn how to change the layout's background color so that it's not always a bland white, but I couldn't figure out how to do that when I was exploring all of the layout panes. One of my goals is to be able to do that by the end of this course.