An Introduction to Remote Sensing for Tribal Lands

NASA’s Indigenous Peoples Capacity Building Initiative invites you to the Introduction to Remote Sensing on Indigenous Lands course. For this course, we have partnered with United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) to offer this all-virtual course with the option for Continuing Education credits. This course will consist of four modules: (1) an introduction to remote sensing and NASA data, (2) land cover classification, (3) change detection and time series analysis, and (4) web tools for remote sensing. Each module will be presented with lectures and hands-on lab exercises when participants will analyze data using Geographic Information System (GIS) software. The lab sections of this course will be taught on ArcGIS Pro, with options for ArcGIS Desktop and QGIS (freely-available). Each theme will also focus on the lands of a tribal partner such as the Navajo Nation, the Sault St. Marie band of Chippewa Indians, the Samish Indian Nation, and the Tulalip Tribes, and others. For each theme, we will also be joined by tribal members from the region to discuss the importance of remote sensing to natural and cultural resource management.

• Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:00-11:00 am PST (10-12 MST)(11-1 CST)(12-2 EST)
• Start Date: Tuesday, October 6th
• End Date: Thursday, October 29th

Prerequisites: Intermediate computer skills are a plus. Some knowledge of geospatial data or previous GIS courses recommended.

Software: The course will be taught in ArcGIS Pro. For most exercises, we will also have guidance for ArcGIS Desktop and QGIS, but the course will focus on the ArcGIS Pro examples.

• ArcGIS (paid): This is a paid service, but you may have access via your tribe or UTTC. Please check with these entities if that is possible. More information on Arc and pricing can be found here: https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-online/overview
• QGIS (free): We recommend using QGIS 3.10 (A Coruña) image processing software, which is an open-source, free of charge software. You must download this software on your personal computer from: https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html Please install the software before class and follow directions carefully. You will need to install Python 3.6 before installing QGIS. You will also need the GDAL library. The installation process is slightly more involved in the Mac operating system. It may take you several hours to install the software on your computer, so do no wait until the last minute.