In this assignment you will use what you have learned over the semester to highlight some ongoing or recent changes to the earth's surface.
The earth is changing every day. With a wide variety of satellite and aerial-borne sensors, we have the ability to monitor these changes in almost real-time. In this lab we will use publicly available satellite imagery to show rapid changes to the earth's surface. I will demonstrate using Sentinel 2 data but you are welcome to use other imagery so long as it comes from a publicly available source.
The final product will be a cartographic product highlighting how your area of interest has changed. What you choose to focus on is up to you. Some ideas:
- volcanic eruptions
- deforestation
- urban sprawl
- forest fire
- flooding
- landslides
- open pit mine
- glaciers calving/melting
- concentrated animal feed operations
If you don't know where/when to find something, look at recent news for ideas.
Background reading:
- Sentinel 2
- EO Browser
- Sentinel 2 indexes
Demonstrate change. Change is dynamic. There are different ways of highlighting change, including but not limited to:
- Time series comparisons
- Change analysis
- Change detection, image differencing, scatter plots, classification matrices
- Indexes
- Different band combinations, ratios, or normalized differences can really highlight a physical attribute on the landscape.
- Graphs
- Indexes over time, aggregated by region (like the rasterio NDVI time series)
This assignment is a lot more flexible than previous assignments. Please use QGIS for your final cartographic product. For processing you are welcome to use a codespace.
This class has lacked in opportunities to be creative so let's unleash that potential. Be creative in what you choose and how you present it.
Submit a pull request to merge your assignment
branch with master
(but do not merge). The assginment
branch should include:
- Either of the following (both are not necessary):
earth-day-map.pdf
- cartographic product produced in QGIS that tells a story of recent earth changesearth-day-map.ipynb
- a Jupyter notebook that tells a story of recent earth changes
methods.md
- a text markdown file describing your methods, including:- data sources
- software used
- license restrictions associated with data use
- This should be reflected in either the map or the notebook but more details can be provided in the
methods.md
file.