McCoy, R.M. 2005. Field Methods in Remote Sensing. New York: The Guilford Press. 159 pages.
Reviewed by
Ketut Wikantika and Firman Hadi
Center for Remote Sensing,
Institute of Technology Bandung, INDONESIA
This compact book written by Roger M. McCoy, a Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Utah, is undoubtedly the kind of book that a novice practitioner in remote sensing needs. There are plenty books with more than four hundred pages describing concepts and applications of remote sensing, but almost none of them adequately explain the important things which should be considered when carrying out field visits in remote sensing projects.
This book is designed as compact as possible. With the size of A5 and less than 200 pages, the book is small enough to be brought to the field, so that it can be called as “a pocket book for remote sensing”. The book tries to expose the forgotten steps in remote sensing research such as the importance of defining clear objectives, how to make sampling in the field, how to finding locations in the field and how to collect thematic data in the field.
The book is definitely useful as a reference for students or researchers in remote sensing who want to make a field remote sensing project. The book simply guides the readers to make an ideal yet practical field data collection for remote sensing. It is also a must read reference for students who do not study remote sensing as a profession but need to use remotely sensed data for simple analyses.
This book covers fundamental tasks required for a remote sensing field investigation, from planning, preparation, through data collection. It consists of nine chapters and three appendices. The first five chapters describe the fundamental tasks that should be done in field remote sensing projects. These include planning, preparation, sampling and data collection. Chapter 6 to 9 describe the basic concepts and practices in conducting measurement of vegetation, soil and other surface materials, water bodies and snow cover, and objects in urban areas. In each chapter, the author briefly introduces his aims of the chapter and describes its limitation. By reading this short introduction, the readers are guided well before they go further and know what to expect.
The author assumes that readers of this book have fundamental concepts in remote sensing but rarely conduct field data collection. Given this reason, fundamental concepts such as spectral response are briefly described closely related to application-specific measures in later chapters. Similarly, as indicated by the book title, data analysis and presentation is naturally not covered.
In my opinion, the first five chapters are must-read chapter. They should be read chapter by chapter if the reader wants a clear picture about what might be involved in a remote sensing field study. Chapter 6 to 9 cover application specific issues. One can pick up related chapters according to their preference.
From a user point of view, I would expect some additional contents for a book like this. First, a brief theory on spectral response should be placed in the first part of the book, since the reader should not be assumed to have advanced knowledge about physical and spectral characteristics of objects and surface materials. Introduction to these subjects and discussion on their relations will give the readers a kick-start to understand what they see through their eyes, on satellite imagery, or via a spectrometer.
Second, the book have detailed discussion on some ‘traditional’ fields of remote sensing, such as vegetation, agriculture, geology, soils, landuse, urban areas and water bodies. Some unfortunate omissions are weather (climate) and oceanography. These fields become increasingly important, particularly related to the greatly publicised global warming issues. Remote sensing technology has the proven ability to contribute in these fields, so that addition of discussions on the related field measurements would add substantial value for the reader.
Third, I think some ‘compromised’ methods should be addressed related to the field methods in remote sensing, in case that the ‘ideal’ prerequisites and conditions are impossible to satisfy. For example, remote sensing application in Indonesia often faces the difficulties of data availability. Given the limited accessibility of satellite images and financial constraints, it is common that field data collection has to be undertaken long after the image was recorded, sometimes months or years after the acquisition. It is therefore difficult to relate the spectral response recorded by satellite imagery and data collected in the field. To cope with this less-ideal condition, a method has been proposed by making semi-structured interviews with local people about the condition (of landuse) in the past when the image was recorded, in order to reconstruct the historical field scenarios. Perhaps, this book would be more complete if it tells us what can be done to what extent within various constraints.
