CAP LTER land cover classification using 2010 National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) Imagery

Detailed land-cover mapping is essential for a range of research issues addressed by sustainability science at large, and increasingly for questions posed of urban areas, such as those of the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER). This project provides the first fine-resolution land-cover mapping of the CAP LTER using 2010 NAIP four-band data. It demonstrates a new object-based method capable of delivering robust outputs for the range of research activities not only undertaken by the program of study but for such studies that appear to be emerging worldwide. The classification process incorporates cadastral GIS data to assist the land-cover type extraction at the parcel scale, and a hierarchical network approach that balances computation time with classification accuracy. Decision rules that may prove useful for other high resolution image classification in other arid-land metropolitan areas are provided.