Mapping Land Use/Land Cover - Literally!

This assignment has us do exactly as the title suggests - we used polygons to cover specific areas and then labeled them for the appropriate type of land use, such as residential, commercial, industry, streams and canals, etc. It was not an overly difficult assignment, although definitely good, challenging practice for identifying features and land types in remote sensing imagery. Most of all, it was very time consuming: 

I did get stuck a few times on this one, and made a few mistakes that took awhile to fix. I think my tendency to be a perfectionist worked against me on this assignment. My time management is something I usually feel good about, but this week's assignment has shown me again that this is an area for improvement.

I began to finish up I realized that the "good" example map from a previous semester was far superior to my map, with a very organized and impressive Legend for Level III Land Use codes: 

My mind raced, trying to aspire to how I could achieve similar results, and I started to realized that I would most likely need to create different Feature Classes for each type of Land use, and then create polygons that would then represent more specific uses. For a moment, I had convinced myself that I would need to start over to accomplish this. 

This was not needed, because we only needed to classify to Level II classifications to fulfill the assignment (versus Level III in the example Legend above). In the end, the map I created had many qualities of the "good" example map, which included proper color choices and saturation to make it easy to read and understand. I reduced the repetition of the labels, too, to make it easier to read.

For the Land Use itself, I looked for indicators of type - such as a large parking lot for commercial areas, large buildings and parked work vehicles for industry, foliage on wetlands to indicate forest, and transportation highways, roads, and secondary roads.

I believe I could spend a LOT more time on this LULC map, to remove slivers, perfect polygons, and classify in more detail. I enjoy this type of GIS work!