Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Armchair mapping with Landsat imagery

In this post I want to show step by step how I extracted hydro power reservoirs and lakes in Laos from up-to-date Landsat imagery for further use in OpenStreetMap. The extraction is done straightforward with common GIS tools but without sophisticated and/or proprietary remote-sensing software.
As an example I take the Nam Leuk hydro power reservoir in Laos. This reservoir needs to be remapped, since the origin user declined the upcoming license change. Currently the reservoir is rather roughly generalized.