Antelope Peak
Northern Arizona University (NAU) has a research project to investigate the
capabilities and limitations of remote sensing to detect, map, and monitor change
within and around the Sonoran Desert National Monument (SDNM) managed by
the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) district office in Phoenix, Arizona. One of
the major tasks of the project is to investigate the effectiveness of using satellite
and/or aerial image data to detect and monitor existing and new roads and trails
within and around the monument; this includes identifying the image
characteristics required for operational type monitoring (i.e. spatial, spectral and
temporal resolutions). It is important to identify the minimum requirements so
that any procedures developed to monitor large isolated landscapes can be
relatively easy to implement in an operational basis. With this in mind one of the
main image data set used to date for the travel network portion of the project has
been 0.5m panchromatic satellite images. Linear features, which were mostly roads
and trails, visually detected interactively using the ArcMap were digitized and put
into separate categories depending on how visible they were in the 0.5m images.
A 0.5m panchromatic satellite image collected on August 25, 2011 covering the
Antelope Peak Area-Of-Interest (AOI) was used and the digitized GIS layers for the
Antelope Peak was completed mid-2014 and delivered to the BLM fall of 2014.
The digitizing and mapping was done by Scott Kelly