Maine Blueberry Farming

Introduction:

Blueberry farming is one of Maine largest economic export. The blueberries are native to Maine and have adapted to the soils acidic and low fertility capacity. The purpose of this investigation is to see the land use changes that has possibly occurred over time and impact of blueberry farming on land in Maine. Has the barren which are the areas were these blueberry farming is practiced increased? Has this increase if any affected land use for other services such as water ways? To help us we will use Remote sensing tool which is the Landsat Imagery and work with it in a GIS station. Landsat 5 is a low earth observation satellite whose mission is to collect raw imagery from the land surface. It started its mission in 1984 and was used to collect over 2.5 million images at an orbit of 705 km. it had a transmission band width of 85Mbit/s. it takes 16 days to complete its orbit. It has seven spectral bands with a thematic mapper and multi spectral scanner features. For this exercise we imported Landsat imagery from 1999 and 2010 into an ArcGIS workstation. We then modified certain elements of the imagery to enable us understand changes to the earth surface on the location, the blue berry barren changes between 1999 and 2010.

Methodology:

To help us in the land detection investigation; I took data available from land sat 5 imagery and imported into the GIS workstation; the data were from 1999 and then a second one from 2010. The next step was to normalize the imagery to enable us make comparisons; this involves converting digital number values present in each pixel and converting them to radiance and then again to reflectance. In the digital number to radiance conversion the map algebra function of the ArcGIS was use...

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...analysis and so I removed the cloud cover, I added the reflectance stack and did a series of model builders to help the analysis. The calculations to find the statistical changes in mean barren was done using geometry tool box.

Conclusion

The barren which is the area most fertile for the growing of blueberry has grown across the study site between the years growing from 1999 to 2010. I used data gathered from land sat 5 and imported it into an arc Gis environment. By carefully following the procedures I analyzed the different scenes from 1999 and then 2010; they were significant land cover changes and this was seen after the cleanup of the data. Blue berry faming is a huge investment in the state of Maine but also it is important land use is respected to avoid environmental impacts damages on other zones such as rivers, streams and land set aside for other purposes.