SBL’s GeoSpatial Services wins tender from Canadian Government

SBL’s GeoSpatial Services division has won yet another tender from the Canadian Government

The work is all about interpreting land use land cover of the area North West Territories. This was the fourth such project awarded to SBL by the Canadian Government in recent times. The work was awarded for two reasons: first, as a result of exceptional quality interpretation provided by SBL during the pilot interpretation stage; second SBL’s exceptional value for money.

‘Land use’ refers to how a parcel of land is used by citizens (e.g. settlements, plantations, agriculture etc) whereas ‘Land Cover’ refers to how the surface of the earth covers that portion of land (e.g. forest land, water bodies, barren land etc). So Land Use will always be assessed in conjunction with the Land Cover of the area. Advances in remote sensing have multiplied imaging of the planet surface under variable spatial resolutions. This has facilitated Land Use Land Cover Mapping (LULC) under various scales of details. Typically SBL follows a standard LULC schema. However for this project the technical team was asked to follow a tailor-made classification schema which best fit the client’s requirement of forest land use land cover classification. Forest classification, hydrographic features classification and infrastructure were the main themes to be included in the classification.

The project was successfully completed well within the stipulated time; SBL has a very experienced team of interpreters who were able to hit the ground running, at short notice. Furthermore the team includes a number of members who specialise in forest land parcel classification.

The provided images were interpreted using interpretation keys created by SBL, specifically for this project. As the team was fully briefed on the end usage of the data, special considerations were given to environmentally sensitive area such as riparian areas and non riparian areas. Very high resolution mono satellite images were used as input for the project.

The interpretation was based on the tone, texture, pattern, association, shape, size etc of the land parcels. Coniferous vegetation parcels were separated from deciduous vegetation types. High land vegetation classes were interpreted in contrast to low land vegetation classes. Special attention was given to riverine environment. Four hectare (ha) areas for land parcels and two ha areas for hydrographic features were the minimum mappable units (MMU) used. The interpretations were created at 1:1000 scale. Later these areas were interrogated at smaller scales to remove subjectivity in the interpretation.

The Quality Control team did an excellent job in refining the interpreted details. In order to remove subjectivity associated with the LULC interpretation, the QC team reviewed the images in color composited format before rechecking 100% of the data at various scales, thereby adding value to the objective classification of the image. The final deliverables were supplied in ESRI compatible format. The solution provided by SBL geospatial team to the client was very cost effective.

About SBL

SBL is an IT and Business Process Management (BPM) company that offers smart solutions to organizations across geographies and industry verticals and empowers them to respond quickly to changing market dynamics. We offer a range of customized services and solutions that allow our customers to reduce operational costs substantially while accelerating the growth of their businesses.Our main verticals are Geospatial Services,Business Process Management, Video Post production services.