Light reflectance is as much as scientific measure as temperature or weight. But we have yet to capitalize on using it as an important measure of land cover change. The challenge the global change research community now faces is understanding what information content light reflectance provides as a measure of land cover change and how it relates to informing us about other important global change processes. If such relationships can be identified, it raises the possibility that surface reflectance can be used as a proxy for inventorying and mapping global change parameters such as carbon sequestered. Remote sensing analysis relates to the human dimensions of global change in that it captures the outcomes of human actions across the landscape.
Analysis can then look at how different land classes have increased or decreased over time.
In some circumstances, the disturbances manifested by human actions may be quite small in spatial extent and may occur in more continuous landscapes. For example, group selection harvesting in a completely continuous deciduous forest landscape may not easily be detected using a traditional pixel classification method. This provides a more sensitive technique to the study of less distinct, but important nevertheless, land cover change. The goal of remote sensing analysis is to provide information about change in natural resources across a site or a region.