Eyes on Earth Episode 48 – Satellites and the Forest Census

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Summary: It’s possible to map vegetation type with Landsat, but getting the maps right requires more than satellites alone. The teams behind LANDFIRE use an extensive network of ground control points to check their work, thereby bolstering the reliability and utility of their multi-layer GIS product suite. On this episode of Eyes on Earth, we meet scientist Karen Schleeweis, who tells us about LANDFIRE’s largest single source of ground truth data, a U.S. Forest Service program called Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA).

Guest: Karen Schleeweis, FIA Techniques Research Band Lead/LANDFIRE Liaison, U.S. Forest Service

Host: John Hult

Producer: John Hult

Release date: April 19, 2021

More on Forest Inventory and Analysis: 

• FIA homepage
• FIA State Fact Sheets
• Applications of the United States Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis dataset: A review and future directions
• Treesearch
• VIDEO: Forest Inventory and Analysis and You