Urban Forest Mapping

Urban forests provide enormous environmental benefits by reducing air pollution, slowing stormwater runoff, and conserving energy.  These benefits can have significant value in terms of dollars.  To determine just how much communities can benefit from their trees, American Forests© developed CITYgreen - a geographic information system (GIS) application that uses information from aerial photographs and data from site-specific surveys to yield economic benefit reports. 

With high-resolution satellite data becoming an affordable and comparable imagery option for enviormental analyses, we have evaluated how well high-resolution IKONOS imagery can detect elements of urban scenes such as buildings, roads, trees and grass.   Two different land cover classification methods were implemented using IKONOS satellite data from August 2000, September 2001 and September 2002.  Following classification, we evaluated how classified IKONOS imagery can be integrated with CITYgreen to estimate the economic benefits of urban forests. 

The study area for this study was the City of Eagan, Minnesota. Eagan, which is located in Dakota County and covers an area of about 34 square miles.  Land-use in Eagan generally consists of urban/developed (single-family/multifamily residential and commercial/industrial), forest, non-developed lands, and numerous small to mid-size lakes.

Classifying land cover >>