Imagery data for the Vegetation Mapping Inventory Project of Colonial National Historical Park

Description

This reference contains the imagery data used in the completion of the baseline vegetation inventory project for the NPS park unit. Orthophotos, raw imagery, and scanned aerial photos are common files held here. Two sets of digital orthophoto mosaics, leaf-on (fall) and leaf-off (spring), were created for Colonial National Historical Park. To achieve manageable file sizes, each set is made up of five files that, together, cover the entire geographic extent of the park. Kucera International acquired color infrared, stereo pair 1:6,000 scale aerial photography for the leaf-on mosaics on October 26, 2001 and, for the leaf-off mosaics on March 1, 2002. The photography was delivered to the National Park Service (NPS), quality checked, accepted as provided, and sent to NCSU-CEO. Upon receipt at NCSU-CEO, the air photos were counted to make sure that none were missing, scanned and saved in .tif format, and placed in the air photo archive maintained at NCSU-CEO for the NPS Northeast Region Inventory and Monitoring Program. Associated data and information provided by Kucera International, and also stored in the air photo archive, include the airborne global positioning system (GPS) and inertial mapping unit (IMU) data files, the camera calibration certificates for the cameras, and the hardcopy flight reports for the photography that crosswalk the airborne GPS and IMU data to the photo frame numbers. The leaf-on and leaf-off mosaics were produced from 328 and 280 color infrared air photos, respectively, scanned at 600 dpi with 24-bit color depth. For each of the ten mosaics (five leaf-on and five leaf-off), scanned .tif images of the relevant air photos were imported into ERDAS Imagine (.img) format where a photo block was created using airborne GPS and IMU data that Kucera International supplied with the aerial photography. Each photo block was manipulated until it could be triangulated with a root mean square error of less than 1. At this point, single frame orthophotos (one for each air photo) were generated within Imagine and exported to Imagine .lan format. Then the .lan files were imported into ER Mapper’s native (.ers) format, and an ER Mapper algorithm was created which contains the color balancing information and the cutlines created for each of the final mosaics. In ER Mapper, band interleaved by line (.bil) image and header files for each mosaic were generated, the .bil images were imported into Imagine .img format, and, finally, the .img images were compressed using MrSID software with a 20:1 compression ratio. The final mosaics, in both .img and MrSID formats, are stored in the NCSU-CEO data archive.

Resources

Name Format Description Link
57 Orthophotos with leaf on https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/DownloadFile/568093?Reference=2233762
33 Aerial Photo Mapbook with Flight Line Index https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/DownloadFile/568090?Reference=2233762
33 Mosaicked Imagery https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/DownloadFile/568091?Reference=2233762
57 Orthophotos with leaf off https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/DownloadFile/568092?Reference=2233762

Tags

  • vegetation-inventory
  • releve
  • nvcs
  • vegetation-mapping
  • botanical-survey
  • geodatabase
  • national-vegetation-classification
  • imagery
  • vegetation
  • vegetation-map
  • remote-sensing
  • classification
  • habitat-types
  • nvc
  • plots
  • accuracy-assessment
  • usnvcs

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