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Essay / Maine Blueberry Farming - 1265
Introduction: Blueberry farming is one of Maine's largest economic exports. Blueberries are native to Maine and have adapted to acidic soils with low fertility capacity. The purpose of this investigation is to see the land use changes that may have occurred over time and the impact of blueberry farming on Maine lands. Have the sterile areas where blueberries are grown increased? Has this increase, if any, affected land use for other services such as waterways? To help us, we will use the remote sensing tool which is Landsat imagery and work with it in a GIS station. Landsat 5 is an Earth observation satellite whose mission is to collect raw images of the Earth's surface. Its mission began in 1984 and collected more than 2.5 million images in an orbit of 705 km. it had a transmission bandwidth of 85 Mbit/s. it takes 16 days to complete its orbit. It has seven spectral bands with a thematic mapper and multispectral scanner capabilities. For this exercise, we imported Landsat images from 1999 and 2010 into an ArcGIS workstation. We then modified certain elements of the imagery to allow us to understand the evolution of the land surface on the site, the evolution of the sterility of blueberries between 1999 and 2010. Methodology: To help us in the detection survey land; I took the data available from the Land Sat 5 imagery and imported it into the GIS workstation; the data was from 1999, then a second from 2010. The next step was to normalize the images to allow us to make comparisons; this involves converting the digital values present in each pixel and converting them to radiance and then back to reflectance. In converting the digital number to radiance, the map algebra function of ArcGIS was used...... middle of paper ...... analysis and so I removed the cloud cover, I added the reflectance stack and made a series of model builders to make analysis easier. Calculations to find statistical changes in mean barrenness were performed using a geometric toolbox. ConclusionThe barren zone, which is the most fertile area for blueberry cultivation, expanded throughout the study site between the growing years of 1999 to 2010. I used data collected from land sat 5 and imported it into a Gis arc environment. By carefully following the procedures, I analyzed the different scenes from 1999 then 2010; These were significant changes in land cover and were noted after data cleaning. Growing blueberries represents a huge investment in the state of Maine, but it is also important that land use is respected to avoid environmental damage to other areas such as rivers, streams and lands reserved for other purposes..