FYI, I agree. If you can help me, you would be very popular if you and I were at this party. I copied your questions and added my answer to hopefully get the ball rolling.
1. You say you are doing a " Barn Owl habitat selection study utilizing Landsat data". Does this mean you are trying to determine what type of land cover/land use (crop field, grassland/prairie, woodland, developed/residential, etc.) the Barn Owls utilize or prefer? If you are not looking at the land cover/land use, what characteristic(s) are you evaluating (proximity to roadways/development, size of range, etc.)?
Yes, I am interested in determining what types of landcover the Barn Owls appear to be selecting. I want to clip the owls positions and flight paths and buffer those clips at different scales(30 m, 300m, 1,000m, etc) to determine proximity/avoidance to certain landcover types(Ex. grassland vs. urban developed areas)
2. If you are looking at land cover, you are not going to be able to get that information directly from Landsat imagery, you will need a processed land cover product (either created by you or you can use a publicly-available product like the National Land Cover Database (although it's a few years out of date) or check to see if your state/country/region has a land cover map available. The Landsat imagery will just have a digital number (indicating brightness) for each pixel in the standard "raw" format you would get from the USGS, not any specific vegetation information.
Yes, I found out after banging my head against the wall that I cannot get the information directly from the image. I have been trying to use the National Landcover Database since the data collected from the database occurred during the same time the data on the owls' positions were collected. I just don't know how to go about getting finding the data and getting it into GIS. I want to find a way to get the percent coverage of each landcover type within the clipped section of the owls' flight paths but I have had no luck in finding a way to do this. My advisor said I needed data associated with the pixels(so when you click on the landcover with the Identify tool, it identifies the landcover type). I found some data from the 2006 Landcover Database in the ArcGIS online data but of course I was not able to make the raster/vector conversion with that data source. He suggested looking at GLOVIS but it seems like those are simply just images. Also, I'm unfamiliar how to create a processed landcover product per your suggestion since I have had little luck finding what I need from the National Landcover Database.
3. If you are not looking for land cover information, can you clarify a bit more what exactly it is you are trying to extract from the Landsat data? There is a lot of potential derived information that can be made from Landsat images, but often it requires processing the images vs. being available in the original 'raw' data.
See above response. It seems like there is a lot of raw data, I'm just confused/overwhelmed in trying to figure out how to refine it.