Automated land-cover models of barrier islands in the Virginia Coast Reserve derived from multi-season HyMAP and PROBE2 imagery

This paper addresses the problem of automated land-cover classification in a chain of barrier islands, collectively known as the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR), an NSF Long Term Ecological Research site. Previously we have reported on the development of automatic land-cover models derived from a HyMAP scene acquired in May 2000 of Smith Island, Virginia, one of the VCR islands. The present work considers five of the six islands covered by additional hyper-spectral collections from another similar sensor, PROBE2. PROBE2 was flown over the VCR on August 22 and October 18, 2001. Between the two sensors, we now have three-season coverage of Smith Island, and two-season coverage of five other VCR islands: Myrtle, Ship Shoals, Wreck, Cobb, and Hog. Automatic classification Models have been derived, using both exploratory unsupervised classification models, and supervised models derived from labelled spectra. Results have been compared with in situ spectrometry measurements taken by us at the VCR and at another site in Great Bay, NJ. We also have acquired PROBE2 imagery in August 2001 at the Great Bay site and collected in-situ spectra there in late July and early August. These data serve as the beginning point of cross-region comparisons.