PE&RS April 2007

This month’s cover shows the completed National Land Cover Database
2001 (NLCD 2001) for the conterminous United States. NLCD 2001 contains 3 primary Landsat-based products: percent tree canopy, percent urban imperviousness, and 16 classes of land cover, all at 30 meter cell resolution from nominal year 2001 imagery. On the cover, the land cover product is displayed nationally against a background of Landsat 7 ETM+ leaf-on imagery for the area around Salt Lake City, Utah. Actual subsets of NLCD 2001 urban imperviousness, tree canopy, and land cover segments from this region are highlighted in full color boxes to demonstrate product detail. An overview of this database is described in the highlight article in this issue. These products were produced by the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium–a group of 13 Federal programs in 10 agencies that partner to purchase Landsat imagery and create land cover products for the Nation. Products and imagery are Web-enabled for download from the MRLC website at www.mrlc.gov. The release of these NLCD 2001 products has been widely anticipated, and this updated information will support a wide variety of users, institutional sectors, and local- to national-scale applications.

Highlight Article

337 Completion of the 2001 National Land Cover Database for the Counterminous United States (Adobe PDF 443Kb)
Collin Homer, Jon Dewitz, Joyce Fry, Michael Coan, Nazmul Hossain, Charles Larson, Nate Herold, Alexa McKerrow, J. Nick VanDriel, and James Wickham

Columns & Updates
343 Grids and Datums — Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Adobe PDF 113Kb)
345 Mapping Matters
349 Book Review — Mapping Our World: GIS Lessons for Educators (Adobe PDF 137Kb)
351 Book Review — Think Globally, Act Regionally: GIS and Data Visualization for Social Science and Public Policy Research (Adobe PDF 290Kb)
352 Industry News
355 Headquarters News (Adobe PDF 64Kb)

Announcements
412 2006 Peer Reviewers (Adobe PDF 44Kb)
476 Call for Papers — Spatial Change Analysis
477 Object-based Image Analysis Symposium

Departments
346 New Member List
346 Region of the Month
348 Certification List
358 Who’s Who in ASPRS
359 Instructions to Authors
384 Forthcoming Articles
402 Calendar
422 ASPRS Member Champions (Adobe PDF 73Kb)
477 Classifieds
478 Professional Directory
479 Advertiser Index
480 Membership Application

Resource 2007
424 Introduction (Adobe PDF 81Kb)
425 Sustaining Members (Adobe PDF 51Kb)
427 Corporate Descriptions (Adobe PDF 1.16Mb)

Peer-Reviewed Articles (Click the linked titles to see the full abstract)

361 A Comparison of Four Common Atmospheric Correction Methods
Abdolrassoul S. Mahiny and Brian J. Turner

An evaluation of the performance of atmospheric correction methods for satellite imagery.

369 A Rigorous Laboratory Calibration Method for Interior Orientation of an Airborne Linear Push-Broom Camera
Tianen Chen, R yosuke Shibasaki, and Zongjian Lin

A rigorous, high accuracy calibration method for three-line imaging systems.

375 Robustness of Change Detection Algorithms in the Presence of Registration Errors
Ashok Sundaresan, Pramod K. Varshney, and Manoj K. Arora

Results from comparing the performance of two change detection algorithms to determine the presence of registration errors.

385 Improvement of Lidar Data Accuracy Using Lidar-Specific Ground Targets
Nora Csanyi and Charles K. Toth

A study on lidar-specific ground control target design and performance evaluation of using the targets to improve lidar data accuracy to approach engineering scale mapping in transportation systems.

397 Estimating Nitrogen in Eucalypt Foliage by Automatically Extracting Tree Spectra from HyMap™ Data
Zhi Huang, Xiuping Jia, Brian J. Turner, Stephen J. Dury, Ian R. Wallis, and William J. Foley

An automatic method for extracting the spectra of individual tree crowns leading to accurate estimates of the nitrogen concentration of eucalypt foliage.

403 Generation of Orthoimages and Perspective Views with Automatic Visibility Checking and Texture Blending
George E. Karras, Lazaros Grammatikopoulos, Ilias Kalisperakis, and Elli Pets

The generation of orthoimages and perspective views of existing fully 3D surface models based on color blending from multiple images and automatic detection of surface and image occlusions.

413 Improving Land-cover Classification Using Recognition Threshold Neural Networks
M.J. Aitkenhead and R. Dyer

Improving land-cover classification from remote sensing imagery with neural networks using a threshold of recognition below which the recognition system applies additional bootstrapped information to classify pixels.