The UTC Graduate School is pleased to announce that William Stuart will present Master’s research titled, Mapping Urban Forest Extent and Modeling Sequestered Carbon Across Chattanooga, TN Using GIS and Remote Sensing on 03/02/2023 at 12:00 – 2:00 PM in University Center, Signal Mountain Room. Everyone is invited to attend.
Environmental Science
Chair: A.K.M. Azad Hossain
Co-Chair:
Abstract:
As metropolitan areas across the United States continue to grow, more of Earth’s unique forest ecosystems are destroyed to make way for new urban development. Chattanooga, Tennessee is among many metropolitan centers experiencing rapid urban growth and subsequent losses to its urban forest. Using remote sensing and digital image processing, this research 1) applied supervised hybrid classification across historic Landsat imagery that quantified the extent of urban tree canopy loss across Chattanooga between 1984 and 2021, 2) modeled the carbon sequestered in the biomass of Chattanooga’s urban trees using field data and vegetation indices, and finally 3) developed the highest resolution land cover dataset ever created for the city of Chattanooga utilizing Skysat imagery, image segmentation, and object-based classification to assess the sub-meter distribution of urban tree canopy across the city. Results from the application of Landsat imagery to conduct the 37-year spatiotemporal analysis found that since 1984, Chattanooga has lost 43% of its urban tree canopy and gained up to 134% of urban land area. Findings from the application of PlanetScope and Sentinel-2a imagery indicate that vegetation indices can be used to model sequestered carbon. Furthermore, when developing predictive carbon models from imagery products, we found that finer spatial resolution imagery will yield better results. Finally, results from the segmentation and classification of Skysat imagery show that the workflow as described here is capable of producing a highly accurate map of urban tree canopy distribution with overall accuracy quantified in excess of 93%. In order to protect Chattanooga’s urban forest into the future, this research suggests the city conduct an annual acquisition of high resolution imagery for the purposes of monitoring the changes in forested and urban land area through time.