Imagery data for the Vegetation Mapping Inventory Project of El Malpais National Monument

This reference contains the imagery data used in the completion of the baseline vegetation inventory project for the NPS park unit. Orthophotos, raw imagery, and scanned aerial photos are common files held here.

Aerial photography was provided by the National Park Service for this project. These photos were acquired on 11/13/2003 as a digital three-band natural color dataset (with the blue, green, and red wavelength portions of the visible spectrum partitioned into Bands 3, 2 and 1 respectively). The photos had been ortho-rectified into a Universal Transverse Mercator Projection, NAD83 Datum, Zone 13. They were mosaicked into two separate images representing the main park area and the headquarters area. The resulting photo-mosaic provided a geometrically accurate map of ELMA with high spatial detail. The radiometric fidelity was consistent throughout. Unfortunately, visible wavelengths tend to be highly correlated with limited spectral information. In this case, except for discriminating between the lava and the non-lava covered landscapes, the imagery was relatively spectrally featureless.