Categories for supervised classification, wildlife analysis?

Question

I am using GIS to undertake a small research on the loss of natural habitat in north England. I will be using Supervised Classification where I train the system on a few examples, e.g. - shallow water - deep water - forest - built area then based on a satellite image the software will create a map with these categories throughout. There is no detailed research question but I would like to have something a bit more detailed than just built environment, vegetation and water. On the other hand there is no need for tens of categories. What categories should I use for this analysis and why?

Answer 1

When starting a project I always like to go out and see what the subject matter experts are doing. In the U.S. check out https://www.mrlc.gov/ their classification system is below.

In general this is a level 2 classification. What you described is a level 1 classification.

see legend at https://www.mrlc.gov/data/legends/national-land-cover-database-2011-nlcd2011-legend