Landsat in Action - Advocating for Landsat with Kass Green
Detailed Description
Kass Green talks about the role Landsat plays to help create high resolution maps, the benefits of the archive at EROS and the value of Landsat imagery to agencies throughout the government.
Details
Date Taken:
Length: 00:03:46
Location Taken: Sioux Falls, SD, US
Video Credits
Producer: Steve Young
Transcript
I'm Kass Green and I'm
president of Kass Green
and Associates and I do
consulting on remote sensing
policy and also mapping
projects.
Usually we've been classifying
Landsat imagery just pixel
by pixel. Which was fine at
the moderate resolution
of Landsat imagery. When
you start getting the high
resolution imagery, there's
lots of noise. So it's really
wonderful to work with
a 6 inch pixel, when I've
got airborne imagery, but
then I've got pixels of
the bright side of the trees
and pixels of the dark side
of the trees and pixels in
between the trees.
So we moved to object
oriented classification and
what that means is you have
an algorithm that draws
circles around the pixels or
polygons around the pixels
and then you classify that
polygon instead of the
individual pixels. You know
the bad side of that is the
high resolution imagery is
always spectrally limited.
It doesn't have the mid
infrared it doesn't have
the thermal, it's also really
expensive so you don't
get multi temporal imagery.
Landsat, it's every 16 days
So what we do now is we
take the objects and we
intersect them with the Landsat
data. So we've got the high
resolution spectral response,
then we get the Landsat
spectral response, and then
we put multi temporal
Landsat data in there. So
bringing those together
is really powerful. I've been
making high resolution
maps for probably over 10
years now. Every single
project, when you look at
the important variables,
Landsat's still one of the
top 10 variables.
EROS is doing an incredible
job with the archive.
To see what it was like in
the beginning and how it
has changed now, it's so
much bigger for one,
They got those old MSS
tapes, got all the archives
in all the different countries,
so we have a worldwide
archive. I mean, EROS' archive
not just Landsat, EROS'
archive with all the different
imagery is really impressive
and it's the only place in the
world that you can get those
kind of data, because that's
where it all lives.
As part of the Landsat advisory
group we did a study where
we looked at what would
be the cost of losing
Landsat data and we looked
at 16 different programs
and I think we came up with
a figure of $1.8 billion
dollars a year if Landsat
wasn't there, so these were
mostly government programs
that are doing their work and
we asked them if you didn't
have Landsat how much would
it cost you every year to do
what you're doing.
And some groups came back
and said we couldn't do what
we're doing. It's more valuable
now because it's free and open.
So organizations can rely on
it. They can rely on it being
there. I think Landsat's
healthier now as a program
than it's ever been and that is
because it's so widely used.
I've been involved in
promoting Landsat since
the early 1990s and I was
involved in the 1992 act
that brought Landsat back
to the government. Landsat
made my career, so I feel
like I owe a lot back to
Landsat. So I speak about it
every chance I can.
From lobbying to giving
interviews, anything I can
do to promote Landsat,
because I think it's a
critical earth resource.
It's that 44 years of
continuity, all those pictures
of the earth and the high
quality, the high calibrated
imagery across the whole
spectrum. We just don't have
anything else like that. It's
the record of what we're doing
to the world, of natural hazards,
natural disasters, we keep
We keep making more people,
we're not making any more
land. That means that resources
are more and more valuable.
And Landsat helps us both
inventory these resources
and monitor change over time.
And as those resources continue
to get more and more valuable,
we desperately need a
Landsat type system that
monitors our resources.