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Use Cases - ASAR

Landmap are keen to work with academic institutions in terms of supporting postgraduate courses, this provides a valuable insight into the challenges our users face when applying spatial data in their research. An example of collaboration work achieved in this area is detailed below.

University of Nottingham

To support the module Professional GIS: Consultancy Project part of the MSc in Geographical Information Systems at the University of Nottingham

Module Summary

Aim

Students were required to conduct a group project on GIS-related topics for real-world clients.

Landmap Involvement

  • Landmap represented the real-world client
  • Gail Millin from the Landmap Service presented the client briefing to the M.Sc group, describing the data available, ideas for applications, requesting a literature review and an evaluation of software to use for radar applications. The projects Landmap required were those focused on monitoring land cover change from radar remotely sensed imagery.
  • Landmap supported the project over the 9 week period by ordering and pre-processing the radar data and delivering the data to the students to use in their group projects.
  • Attendance of the oral presentations for each of the three groups and providing feedback from the client prospective to the course tutor Prof Giles Foody and the students.

 

Outputs of the Project

  • The students delivered their final reports and presentations to Landmap and course tutor which were:
  • Group 1: Monitoring temporal changes in a forest ecosystem to estimate terrestrial carbon fluxes using optical/Radar imagery.
  • Group 2: Comparison of ASAR Image Mode and Wide Swath Mode regional land cover classification.
  • Group 3: Assessment of Optical and Radar imagery for detection and quantification of urban growth and change in Ashford, Kent.
  • The University of Nottingham provided taught sessions to the students covering issues related to the broad applications area of SAR imagery and land cover classification, project management and delivery.
  • Students were provided with high quality data for their projects and gained knowledge on how to identify, order and implement radar data for their applications using EoliSA the European Space Agency (ESA) catalogue.

 

This work tried to investigate some of the questions raised in the below paper presented at the RSPSoc Conference in 2006.

Kitmitto, K. and Millin, G.R.(2006) 'Why Radar is not used more in the Study of UK Environments?'. RSPSoc Annual Conference, Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, UK. PDF File (477 KB)