The Environmental Management Technical Center's (EMTC) Fiscal
Year 1992 effort to develop a systemic spatial data base of land
cover/land use within the Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS)
has been completed. The UMRS spans eight degrees of latitude
and includes the Upper Mississippi River from Minneapolis,
Minnesota, to Cairo, Illinois (130 km), and the navigable
reaches of the Illinois (526 km), the Kaskaskia (19 km), the
Black (2 km), the St. Croix (40 km), and the Minnesota Rivers
(42 km). Systemically, the aerial extent of the study area
includes 1,137,035 ha (2,809,575 a) as defined by the floodplain
of these river reaches. The EMTC acquired and processed 1989
Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite imagery to produce the
land cover/land use data base. The Landsat program, which began
in 1972 with the launch of the first multispectral scanner by
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has evolved
over time and now provides much higher spatial and spectral
resolution than earlier platforms. Each scene recorded covers
an area on the ground approximately 185 x 170 km and has a pixel
resolution of 30 x 30 m. Seven full scenes were required to
cover the study area, from which the floodplain was extracted.
Figure 1 displays the study area and the coverage of each scene.
Image processing was accomplished using the Earth Resources Data
Analysis System. Once the data are edited they will be
converted to the ARC/INFO GRID module for analysis.
