Visualizing a land cover map of Fort Ord, California

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, and at a density dictated by your % green cover map

Prerequisites

• Download and install Tarsier

Data

• Fort Ord land cover map (and associated land cover metadata)
• Map or % green cover (Fort Ord)

Recomended Reading

Tarsier tutorial: Raster data

Tarsier tutorial: Raster resampler

Tarsier tutorial: Renderer

Tarsier tutorial: Simple fly-through

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:

1. Open Tarsino
2. Open your Fort Ord land cover map:
   1. ->File ->Open
   2. Navigate to your land cover map and double click the file
3. Open the Raster Lookup tool:
   1. ->File ->New ->Tools ->Raster Lookup
4. Load the land cover map into the Raster Lookup
   1. In the Raster Lookup view, use the drop down box next to Input Raster: to select your land cover map
5. Click the Find Values button
6. 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.
7. Reclassify the map.
   1. Right now the "Output" column is filled with "-9999" which is the default null value. This will be the value of your "Other" class.
   2. For any input value that you think represent forest or trees, edit the corresponding output value by typing a "1" into the cell.
   3. For any input value that you think represent shrubs or chaparral, give the output value a "2".
8. After you have finished editing the table, click the Execute button on the Raster Lookup view.
9. View and save your reclassified raster
   1. To the right of Output Raster 0: click the View button
   2. 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), 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.

1. Export your reclassified map to a Raster Symbol Scheme
   1. Make sure your the raster view window is active, if not click on it
   2. ->Raster ->Export to RasterSymbolScheme (This should open a new view window)
2. In the RasterSymbolScheme view you will see a list of all the non-null values from your reclassified raster. Click on unnamed 1 to edit its properties
   1. Recall that the value "1" is to represent trees, so in the box next to Tag type Trees
   2. Set the Max Height to something reasonable for a Fort Ord tree, maybe 7
   3. Click Load Texture and navigate to your Oak.bmp
   4. Set the Transparent Color bar to the background color of the *.bmp file to make it transparent
3. Repeat the editing process for the shrub class (unnamed 2)