GIS 4035: Final Project

 The final project for GIS 4035 was a do your own project with a base idea being given. The Lake Tahoe Basin is experiencing urbanization surrounding the lake and this is causing storm water run-off which is then in effect causing eutrophication to the lake. This is where the nutrient levels are too rich and cause many problems with the water quality (algae blooms, fish kills, dangerous waters, etc.) The goal of this project was to see can we tell through using satellite imagery whether or not urbanization is increasing over time and if so we can interpret that the amount of storm water run-off is likely increasing as well. On the left you can see a image from 1992 which shows Lake Tahoe with a few features classified which do differ a bit from the image on the right which is the same Lake Tahoe map but from 1999. I used unsupervised classification on the right image and broke it down to 50 classes for identifying. In this I ended up with 5 features (which differed a bit from the left which had snow) and while it appears to be severely different from the 1992 the features are subject to pixel confusion. While some of them were leaning more to the mixed category it was still easy to tell that the urbanization was indeed increasing over time. With being able to interpret this from using satellite imagery we can interpret that our initial quandary is likely true that the storm water run-off is likely increasing as well.