Pike County is located in eastern Kentucky. The county is known for its coal fields, and has a long history of fossil fuel extractions (coal and natural gas). As a result, it is one of the nation’s leading producers of these goods. With the task of mapping damage and recovery from mountaintop removal coal mining, the best region of interest (for now) is the area surrounding Fishtrap Lake. This is because, since the mid 1990’s, there has been both an area having undergone remediation and an area where mountaintop removal mining has started. To determine the changes from mining and remediation, I would use Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager imagery. I picked the TM instrument because of its long operational history that will …show more content…
From there, I would classify the images’ land cover/use using a supervised method based off of high resolution imagery (I would just use Google Earth), classifying into Water (very low reflectance across all wavelengths), Forest (this would be unaffected forest with moderately high NIR reflectance), Vegetation (this would be the remediation with likely a high NIR reflectance for grasses which would be the first to grow back), Mined Area (low visible and NIR reflectance but higher SWIR 1 and 2 reflectance), and Developed (similar to Mined Area in SWIR reflectance, but likely to be higher reflectance in the visible and NIR wavelengths). Training areas would be those I can tell with absolute certainty by looking at Google Earth imagery. I would then perform a confusion matrix to check the accuracy and adjust/add training areas until it’s very