study area from 6 February to 22 March 2003 to collect ground truth information for the analysis of the 2003 image. A hardcopy
false color composite ETMþ (RGB 432) image depicting different LULC types was used in the field to identify existing land cover
features, with special attention given to spectrally similar features. Based on this fieldwork, a ground truth map was prepared
for locating training pixels on the image and 200 reference data points were collected using a global positioning system (GPS).
This GPS information was then overlaid with the image in GIS to select training areas and for accuracy assessment; 100 of the
GPS points were used for sampling and the other 100 were used for assessing the accuracy of the classification