This project analyzes the relationship between vegetation 🌳 health and socio-economic factors in Sacramento County, California, focusing on NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and household income.
To examine how vegetation health, measured by NDVI derived from Landsat satellite 🛰️ imagery, correlates with socio-economic status, specifically the percentage of households earning less than $35,000 annually, across Sacramento County census tracts.
- R (dplyr, tidyverse, tidyr, sf, tidycensus)
- ArcGIS Pro 🗾
- Microsoft Excel
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NDVI Calculation:
- Combined the red and near-infrared bands of Landsat multispectral satellite imagery in ArcGIS Pro.
- Calculated NDVI to assess vegetation density and health; higher values indicate healthier vegetation.
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Socio-Economic Data Integration:
- Retrieved 2019 5-year ACS income data using the tidycensus package in R.
- Computed the percentage of households with incomes below $35,000 per census tract.
- Acquired census tract spatial boundaries from the Census Bureau’s TIGER/Line data and joined it with income data for spatial visualization.
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Zonal Statistics:
- Used ArcGIS Pro to perform zonal statistics, calculating mean NDVI values within each census tract.
- Aggregated vegetation health data at the tract level to enable localized socio-environmental analysis.
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Analysis:
- Plotted average NDVI against the percentage of low-income households in Excel.
- Found a low correlation (R² = 0.1605), indicating limited relationship between vegetation health and household income in Sacramento County.
- Landsat satellite imagery bands (red and near-infrared)
- Census tract shapefiles (TIGER/Line)
- ACS income datasets (2019 5-year estimates)
- Resulting NDVI rasters and zonal statistics outputs
The study suggests that vegetation health, as represented by NDVI, is not strongly dependent on household income levels within Sacramento County census tracts, providing insights into the complex socio-environmental dynamics in urban areas.
Feel free to explore the code and data files to reproduce or expand upon this analysis.