An image analysis system to develop area sampling frames for agricultural surveys

The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has been developing area sampling frames as a vehicle for conducting surveys to gather a variety of agricultural data nationwide. In 1987, NASS was awarded a National Aeronautics and Space Administration research grant to develop a digitally based system to automate this process which had been conducted using a labor-intensive, paper-based technique. This system, the Computer Aided Stratification and Sampling (CASS) system, was developed by NASS and the Ames Research Center Ecosystem Technology Branch, and has now been implemented into NASS' operational program. This paper discusses and compares the manual procedure and the new methodology and the results of this research effort