Visualizing a land cover map of Fort Ord, California
From CCoWS Wiki
Contents
Outcomes
- Render Fort Ord in a 3d realistic virtual reality
- Use your land cover map to populate the visualization with trees and shrubs where appropriate
Prerequisites
- Fort Ord land cover map
- Habitat classification chart
Intorduction
In your remote sensing class (external link perhaps?) you have developed and ground truthed a land cover map. . .
Simplify the land cover map
Your land cover map has too many classes for our purposes. We will want to reclassify the map distilling the classes down to just three: trees, shrubs, and other. This process could be done in other programs as well, but here is how it is done in Tarsier:
- Open Tarsino
- Open your Fort Ord land cover map:
- ->File ->Open
- Navigate to your land cover map and double click the file
- Open the Raster Lookup tool:
- ->File ->New ->Tools ->Raster Lookup
- Load the land cover map into the Raster Lookup
- In the Raster Lookup view, use the drop down box next to Input Raster: to select your land cover map
- Click the Find Values button
- To the right of Lookup Table Data:, click the View button. This will display a table with a column, Input, for all the values from the input raster (your land cover map) and another column, Output, that will dictate the new values for the reclassified map.
- Reclassify the map.
- Right now the "Output" column is filled with "-9999" which is the default null value. This will be the value of your "Other" class.
- For any input value that represents forest or trees, edit the corresponding output value by typing a "1" into the cell.
- For any input value that represents shrubs or chaparral, give the output value a "2".
- After you have finished editing the table, click the Execute button on the Raster Lookup view.
- View and save your reclassified raster
- To the right of Output Raster 0: click the View button
- Save the raster: With the Raster View window active, ->File ->Save As. . . Save your raster to an apropriate location. Tarsino will recognise file names up to 255 characters (no spaces)0, so name your file something informative like "'Original file name'_ReclassifiedTo.Trees.Shrubs.Other.'yymmdd'.tra"
Creating Raster Symbol Scheme
The reclassified map has three classes, one of which is null (Other). You now need to let Tarsier know how you want the non-null classes to be visually represented in a render. One way to do this is to create a symbol scheme.
- Export your reclassified map to a Raster Symbol Scheme
- Make sure your the raster view window is active, if not click on it
- ->Raster ->Export to Symbol Scheme (This should open a new window)