How to Use this Book
Background
This manual introduces users to using remote sensing with ArcGIS® Pro. While a majority of examples in this text utilize Landsat 9 imagery, the techniques and examples provided are also applicable to other imagery sources as well, including multispectral image mosaics collected by small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS; sometimes referred to as drones, UAV’s. etc.).
Although the processes discussed in this book were accomplished with ArcGIS® Pro 3.1.2. However, many of the tools and shortcut icons introduced in this book may be available with prior versions. Prior knowledge of ArcGIS® Pro is encouraged, but not required, as an introduction to the basics is provided. This manual was designed to be an introductory text and can be used as a lab manual. This document is not intended to be a comprehensive, theoretical, or practical for image analysis manual, or a comprehensive ArcGIS® Pro user manual. Nor is this book intended to replace remote sensing textbooks.
The goal of this book is to expand student access to remote sensing analysis by introducing students to use of ArcGIS® Pro capabilities, thereby facilitating access to additional remote sensing software. This manual does not cover remote sensing fundamentals and users of the manual should refer to remote sensing textbooks, such as suggested in the list of potential references below. Furthermore, users of this manual should remain aware of the distinctions between GIS analysis and the practice of remote sensing, which often use similar software, but require mastery of much different knowledge bases.
How to Use this Book
The chapters within this book are designed to be completed in sequence. In most cases, each chapter builds on knowledge acquired from preceding chapters. The first nine chapters introduce the user to some of the basics of ArcGIS® Pro. Chapters 10 – 23 assume that readers have knowledge of these basics. The introductory chapters do not include information on how to download basic GIS files but users may use any point, line or polygon vector files, any elevation raster file, and any map document completed in another GIS software to complete these tutorials.
Notes on setting up projects in ArcGIS® Pro
Each university handles software, data access and digital storage space for students differently. So, when we are discussing how to save projects and data, it may differ from the requirements (or abilities) of students at your university. This is an item that you will likely need to discuss with students at the beginning of your classes.
Additionally, you may want to have your students set up a project for each chapter of the book as they are proceeding through the book. This, of course, will depend on how you set up your lab instructions and how the university handles the items noted in the prior paragraph. Again, we have been general in asking students to open a new project or open an existing project. In many cases, we just state open an ArcGIS® Pro project and note that the students need to check with their instructor on whether this should be a new or an existing project.
However, for the chapters on classification (Chapters 21 – 25), we do recommend that students open a new project for each chapter. When working through these chapters, a large amount of data is being processed and we have discovered that using the same project over and over again will more likely cause failures in ArcGIS® Pro or slow processing time significantly. We have written these chapters with the instructions to open a new project and to add the appropriate image or files created from prior chapters.
Data for this Book
Shapefiles used in this book are available for download from: https://virginiaview.cnre.vt.edu/books/ or by emailing Tammy Parece at parece.1@osu.edu.
If shapefiles for areas not specifically covered in this book are desired, they can be acquired from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Tigerline data base – http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html, and polygons files can be downloaded from many U.S. municipalities, such as Roanoke, Virginia (ftp://ftp.roanokeva.gov/GIS/Shapefiles/), Richmond, Virginia (ftp://ftp.ci.richmond.va.us/GIS), or Chicago, Illinois (https://data.cityofchicago.org/browse?tags=gis). You can locate and access many other municipalities’ GIS files from the web by using the search terms:
- Downloadable GIS files for name of municipality, or
- Name of municipality FTP site
- Searching for data on ArcGIS Online
Most GIS files are downloaded as .zip files. The raster files used in the first six tutorials are from a Landsat 9 Scene over Roanoke Virginia and were downloaded from the United States Geologic Survey’s Earth Explorer, but this file is also available at the link identified above.
The Chapter Sequence
If you have a working knowledge of ArcGIS® Pro, then you can start with Chapter 10 in which we introduce remotely sensed imagery principles. If you are familiar with Landsat and Earth Explorer, you can skip most of Chapter 11 (Searching and Downloading Landsat 9 Imagery). However, you should peruse this chapter to identify the image used in most of the other chapters. Chapter 12 reviews the metadata for this Landsat 9 image. We recommend that you review this chapter as metadata does vary from image to image.
Even if you are familiar with Landsat scenes and downloading the scenes from the web, you will need to complete Chapters 13 through 16. These chapters cover displaying Landsat 9 imagery and additional processing of the downloaded image for use in Chapters 17 – 19 and Chapters 21 – 23.
Chapters 13 – 19 and Chapters 21 – 23 use a single Landsat 9 scene which covers part of central and western Virginia. Chapter 20 Change Detection, uses two Landsat 8 scenes from southwestern Colorado. This chapter can be completed independently if you already know how to use Earth Explorer. However, we recommend completing Chapters 17 – 19 on image enhancement as these techniques will be useful in identifying the changes that occur between the two Colorado images.
Chapters 13 through 16 must be completed before doing Chapters 17 through 19 and 21 through 23. It is recommended that you complete Chapters 17 through 19 as image enhancement techniques will assist with image classification. You must complete Chapters 21 through 24 before the final chapter – Chapter 25 Accuracy Assessment. While our main purpose is to focus upon use of Landsat 9 imagery in ArcGIS® Pro. These chapters do introduce techniques that prepare you to complete similar analyses using images from other sensors such as Sentinel, AVHRR, and multispectral sensors onboard sUAS platforms. Landsat 9 imagery is used in this text because it is readily available online for most of the Earth’s land surface area; it is well documented, consistent, and free.
Again, this book merely serves as an introduction to using ArcGIS® Pro in remote sensing analyses. These chapters do not cover all the tools and methods available within any software program but throughout the book, in specific sections, we acknowledge other techniques/processes and point the readers to other references for additional information. This book is not a substitute for remote sensing textbooks, which present the concepts and context that support application of the techniques covered here. We encourage use of this book in the context of a more complete program to cover the information and concepts that support the applications presented here.