Integration of landsat thematic mapper and census data for quality of life assessment

The quality of life (QOL) of the Athens-Clarke County of Georgia was assessed by integrating environmental variables extracted from Landsat thematic mapper data with socioeconomic variables obtained from the U.S. Census data. The environmental variables extracted are (1) land use/cover, particularly percentage of urban use; (2) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI); and (3) apparent surface temperatures. The socioeconomic variables from the census data are (1) population density, (2) per capita income, (3) median home value, and (4) percentage of college graduates. NDVI, which shows strong negative correlation with “per cent of urban use” and “surface temperatures,” is in turn strongly correlated with per capita income, population density, and median home value. The environmental and socioeconomic variables are integrated by means of two approaches: (1) principal components analysis and (2) geographical-information-system overlay of ranked data layers. These two approaches constitute respectively an objective and a subjective assessment of the QOL of the study area. The results of these analyses indicate that satellite inwge data can contplentent census data in providing QOL assessment with an environmental perspective.