Contest category: Unique Geomorphologic Images Application areas: Environmental, Forestry / Land Management, Land Information/Land Use Description: Australia is well known as a dry brown land but the country also has some of the most spectacular littoral habitats in the world. Curtis Island off the cost of Queensland is an island paradise with some 15,000 hectares of conservation parkland teeming with bird-life. In this image you can see tentacle like river tributaries fringed with mangroves meandering through sand dunes. Pockets of eucalypt forest can also be seen on the lower edge and upper right quadrants. In the upper left of the image you can see a boat approaching the shoreline.
This pretty picture from space is also a useful tool for land managers. Habitat assessment in river and coastal inlets must be based on quality data about landcover, landuse and vegetation mapping. This imagery can be used to monitor disturbance intensity and patterns, as well as vegetation condition.
We love our sunburned country, but we are quite fond of the coastal fringes too.
Geographic location: Australia, Queensland, Great Barrier Reef, Curtis Island. 50km south east of Rockhampton. Centre latitude/longitude of 23° 30' 16" South, 150° 54' 35" East. Source of imagery: SPOT 5 satellite, 26 July 2003. Collected by the satellite’s High Resolution Geographic instrument and acquired in four bands at 10m resolution: green, red, near infra-red and short-wave infra-red. Image processing technique employed: A sharpening algorithm was applied to improve definition and clarity. The image was resampled to 5 metre pixels and a natural colour model was applied. Finally, the histograms were tweaked a little. — Nigel Catchlove (corporatecommunications@raytheon.com.au), Raytheon Australia, Australia |
