Can Canopy analyze multiple units within a study area?

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azelaya
i-Tree Team
Posts: 372
Joined: Fri Jun 27, 2008 10:50 am

Can Canopy analyze multiple units within a study area?

Post by azelaya » Sun Feb 12, 2012 6:01 pm

Canopy does not have the functionality to allow for multiple areas to be surveyed simultaneously but you can still use Canopy to analyze individual units within an entire study area. Basically, this is achieved by doing multiple Canopy surveys using the same cover scheme applied to each unit. For example, some Canopy users will survey an entire area such as a city and then also conduct a survey on sub-units within the area such as wards or neighborhoods for comparison.

Although there may be more time and effort involved in comparing cover between areas, a comprehensive survey may be more valuable for planning, management and advocacy. Future versions of Canopy will allow users to save the cover class categories they initially set up for use in subsequent surveys.

The photo interpretation methodology in i-Tree Canopy was originally used by the U.S Forest Service in a GIS system where approximately 1000 points were generated and surveyed within each of 63 regions across the U.S to evaluate National Land Cover Database (NLCD) cover estimations. Methods can be viewed in the following journal article http://www.itreetools.org/vue/resources ... k_NLCD.pdf

Al
A member of the i-Tree Team
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