LANDSAT

http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/education/compositor/

Landsat are used for a wide variety of applications of land surface changes in land-use planning, agriculture, disaster reduction, water management, and analysis of human development. Currently, landsat 5 and landsat 7 are actively collecting data but are near the end of their functional lives. A successor to these satellites, the landsat data continuity mission, is scheduled to be launched in 2011. The creation of the national land imaging program will ensure the availability of these key data far into the future. The new plan for a national land imaging program will provide a mechanism within the interior department to assess the land imagery needs of federal agencies, state and local land management officials, scientists, and geographic researchers, and to translate those needs into the technical capabilities of future satellites. Responsibility for development, launch, and management of the long series of landsat satellites has historically moved among agencies, and establishing the national land imaging program will ensure a consistent planning and budgeting process for future land imaging missions. The plan was developed by the future of land imaging interagency working group (fliiwg), an ad hoc group convened under the national science and technology council, committee on environment and natural resources.

RESEARCH PAPER USING LANDSAT

1-USING LANDSAT DATA TO ASSESS LAND USE CONVERSION IMPACTS ARISING FROM URBANIZATION: THE CANADIAN CONTEXT
Ying Zhang* and Bert Guindon
Natural Resources Canada, 588 Booth Street, Ottawa, Canada, K1A 0Y7

http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/zhang.pdf

ABSTRACT:
While Canada ranks second in the world in terms of national land area, its most productive arable land is limited in extent. These lands are also under pressure due to rapid urbanization, especially in the high growth areas of southern Ontario, the Calgary-Edmonton corridor and the lower Fraser River valley of British Columbia. Currently, a program is underway in the Earth Sciences Sector of Natural Resources Canada to quantify urban transportation sustainability in support of energy policy-makers. This work includes the creation of the Canadian Urban Land Use Survey (CUrLUS), a series of land-cover/land-use (LCLU) maps, derived in part from Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery, for all Canadian cities with populations in excess of 200,000. These LCLU maps have potential application beyond transportation issues. To study land conversion impacts during the period 1966-2001, it has been necessary to assimilate this information with historic land use sources from other federal initiatives including the Canada Land Use Mapping (CLUMP) program and the Canada Land Inventory (CLI). This paper addresses assimilation issues through an assessment of the consistency of these information sources leading to a rationalization of their class legends and spatial resolution differences.

2- Land Cover Change Detection using ALOS and LANDSAT Data in Thailand
http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/conf/Proc_PIsymp2007/contents/proceedings/LULC/LUG08.pdf 

Abstract

Land cover change detection is necessary for updating land cover maps. The two multi-date images from remotely-sensed data of ALOS AVNIR-2 and LANDSAT-5 TM were used to detect land cover. These images covered in part of Phitsanulok Province, Lower Northern Thailand, which is one of the fertility areas for rice production. These data have been used to classify land cover with supervised classification by maximum likelihood, and being adopted by using the training samples obtained from the ground truth. The results showed the preliminary changes of land cover over a 3-year period, and displayed the difference of land cover map in the study area. These maps are utilized for stratification approach and land use planning in Thailand. Keywords: ALOS AVNIR-2, Land Cover Change Detection.