Getting land cover percentages from lulc?

[JohnWilliams1]

Hey all,

I am currently doing a thesis project in which I am classifying the LULC for a particular region. Within that region there are 33 sites which serve as survey areas. So my question is, after I have classified the image for LULC using supervised classification with maximum likelihood analysis, how do I go about determining the land use percentage inside each of the 33 survey sites. For example all 33 sites will be a circle with a 2km radius, and within that circle 100% of it is classified to some type of land cover. So I want to know how I can go about finding out exactly what types of cover make up that 100%. So at site 1 it could be 33% forest, 22% water, 5% urban, and 40% grassland and site 2 could be 25% water, 25% forest, 20% urban, and 30% marsh. So how exactly can I use an analysis to determine the percentages that are inside the circle? or what analysis/package can I use to do this. I have access to ENVI and ArcGIS 10

Thanks for your help,
Eric

[Anonymous User]

I have done something similar before.  You could try something like this:

1. extract your LULC raster by the mask of your study sites.
2. use the zonal stats as histogram function to get a count of each LULC type within each zone (zone being the study sites, use FID as zone field)
3. summarize the count field for each zone to get the count of cells in each study area (probably will be the same (or very close) for each if you are using circles).
4. relate the summed table to the zonal stats table and divide the count of each LULC type in each zone by total number of cells (summed count field) per zone to get percentage.