Mountain Top Removal - Analyze Week

Special Topics - Project 2 Week 2

This week we used 2010 Landsat data to create a polygon of current Mountain Top Removal (MTR) areas in the Appalachian Coal Regions of West Virginia and surrounding states.  The first step was to create a single raster dataset from 7 Landsat bands using the Data Management Raster Processing tool Composite Bands, saving it as an .img file.  The Spatial Analyst Extraction tool Extract by Mask was used to clip the composite raster to the study area, again saving to an .img file to use in ERDAS Imagine.

In ERDAS, an Unsupervised Classification was performed on the clipped image with a number of 50 classes.  Areas of MTR were then identified by picking a pixel on this classified image and changing the Class designation for that pixel in Class_Name field in the attribute table to MTR, and the color to Red.  Once all the MTR areas were identified and changed the rest of the pixels were assigned a class designation of NonMTR and the color changed to Dark Green.

This saved image was then added to ArcMap and reclassified with the Spatial Analyst Reclassify tool by populating the New Values field with a 1 for the MTR classes and left blank for the NonMTR classes and the missing values assigned to No Data, creating a new raster of polygons around the MTR areas.