Monitoring Mining Induced Land Use / Land Cover Change in the Athabasca Oil Sand Mining District of Northeast Alberta

This project measures the growth of the Athabasca Oil Sand Mining District in northeastern Alberta.

A detailed report for this project, 29 pages in length was written for this project, which can be found here: Report on Monitoring Mining Induced Land Use / Land Cover Change in the Athabasca Oil Sand Mining District of Northeast Alberta. Many different GIS and remote sensing techniques were used in this project including:

• Creating maps displaying the change in land use / land cover (LULC) and increase in mine area.
• Using Model Maker in Erdas, which is similar to Model Builder in ArcMap, to determine the LULC changes over five different time steps.
• Calculating the change in LULC classes over the time intervals in Excel.
• Performing atmospheric and radiometric correction on Landsat 5 imagery in Erdas.
• Executing object based classification with Ecognition.
• Improving the classification using Knowledge Engineer in Erdas.
• Doing an accuracy assessment using Google Earth Pro, Erdas, and ArcMap.

The report also includes a literature review to help compare the project to similar studies.