In conjunction with the Yellow Crazy Ant eradication project being conducted on Johnston Atoll, located approximately 800 miles west of Honolulu, Hawaii, team members took the opportunity to develop and conduct a vegetation mapping project. This project will develop future refuge management decisions for this remote atoll.
WorldView-2 satellite imagery was collected April 2013 and processed using ERDAS Imagine. The imagery was segmented and polygons were prioritized to ensure enough training sites were sampled for the identified classes. Phase 1 of the project was focused on creating a vegetation map at a Formation class level (forest, shrubs, grass, barren, and concrete). Phase 2 will refine the forest and shrubs Formation classes to the Group level and possibly the Alliance level of the National Vegetation Classification System (NVCS) (http://usnvc.org/). Phase 1 was finished in November 2013. Phase 2 is projected to be completed by end of summer 2014.