So why don't we take a quick look at the overview of i-Tree Canopy. The first thing we do is
access our i-Tree tools here at www.i-Treetools.org and that will bring us up to our home page
where describes components of i-Tree. In order to reach the i-Tree canopy application what
we will simply do is go to the applications button and pulldown and open up to i-Tree
Canopy. When we open up i-Tree Canopy what we see is the initial page which details and
it goes through some of the little screenshots here of the various components of i-Tree.
i-Tree Canopy offers a quick and easy way to produce statistically valid estimates of
land cover types, for example tree cover, impervious materials and shrub layers using
aerial images available from Google maps. And the canopy can be used by urban forestry
managers to estimate the tree canopy cover, set tree canopy goals and monitor changes
over time. And it can also be used to estimate inputs for use in other applications within
the i-Tree including i-Tree Hydro and other programs where land cover classification data
is needed. The tools are designed to allow users to easily and accurately estimate tree
and other canopy classes within a defined area or within city limits or any in the location
that they want to delineate. The tool randomly lays points and the number of these points
are determined by the user. These points are randomly laid over a Google Earth imagery
and the user classifies where each of these points lands, based on a series of classifications
that they have set up in the preliminary work. The idea is that you interpret from point-to-point
to point whether you have trees or impervious material, shrub layer or grass areas. The
point of it is that in the analysis you set it up to work out the way that best suits
your needs. So the first thing you do is you delineate your study area, and many times
that's a geographical area, and in most cases were looking at a city or town's municipal
boundaries. So then we either import that data from a GIS shape file or we create our
own using the Google imagery. And once we have defined our study area, we go ahead and
define our cover class areas or the cover classifications that we intend to use for
our study area, whether that be trees or grass or buildings, non-tree areas and others. It
defaults to tree and non-tree, but we can put in as many variables as we want for the
classifications. Then the third step is just to start classifying the point locations in
the randomly selected locations that are picked by i-Tree Canopy software using the Google
Earth and Google maps imagery. So the idea is that one point is selected, we pulled our
drop-down list and we go to its classification then move to next point. We repeat that process
until we've completed on the most points we can for the project. The more points that
are interpreted, the more accurate the estimate. So we will go into some of the details in
our other videos, but I wanted to give you a quick overview of the intent and the goals
of the i-Tree Canopy, offering you this quick and easy way to produce a statistically valid
estimates of land cover types in a community or defined geographic area.}