Arctic vegetation cover fractions derived from Landsat time series (1984-2020) for the greater Mackenzie Delta Region (Western Canadian Arctic)

Data to the publication by Nill et al. (2022) "Arctic shrub expansion revealed by Landsat-derived multitemporal
vegetation cover fractions in the Western Canadian Arctic"

The dataset features Landsat-derived fractional cover estimates of Arctic plant functional types (shrub, evergreen trees, herbaceous, lichen) and other land cover (barren, water) in the greater Mackenzie Delta Region, Canada.
We utilized regression-based unmixing based on synthetic training data in order to build multitemporal Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR) models for estimating fractional cover and validated our predictions based on independent very-high-resolution imagery (please be referred to publication for details).

Dataset information
The fraction cover predictions ("krr-avg") are provided separately for each epoch (1984-1990, 1991-1996, ..., 2015-2020) and class/cover type. The decadal change images ("dec-cng") between 1984 and 2020 are provided separately for each class/cover type. The naming convention of the files is as follows:

XXXX-XXXX_YYY-YYY_int16-10e3_class-Z-Z

• XXXX-XXXX = epoch, e.g. 2015-2020
• YYY-YYY = dataset ("krr-avg" = fraction cover, "dec-cng" = decadal fraction cover change)
• Z-Z = class ID and associated class name (sh = shrub, cf = coniferous, hb = herbaceous, lc = lichen, wt = water, br = barren)

The fraction cover values are % scaled by 10,000. For instance, a value of 1234 refers to 12.34%. Further image metadata:

• Datatype: Signed 16-bit integer (Int16)  
• Data format: GeoTiff (.tif)
• No data value: -9999
• Projection: EPSG:3573 with custom central meridian; WKT string: 'PROJCS["WGS 84 / North Pole LAEA Canada",GEOGCS["WGS 84",DATUM["WGS_1984",SPHEROID["WGS 84",6378137,298.257223563,AUTHORITY["EPSG","7030"]],AUTHORITY["EPSG","6326"]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0],UNIT["degree",0.0174532925199433,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9122"]],AUTHORITY["EPSG","4326"]],PROJECTION["Lambert_Azimuthal_Equal_Area"],PARAMETER["latitude_of_center",90],PARAMETER["longitude_of_center",-135],PARAMETER["false_easting",0],PARAMETER["false_northing",0],UNIT["metre",1],AXIS["Easting",EAST],AXIS["Northing",NORTH]]'

Publication
Nill, L., Grünberg, I., Ullmann, T., Gessner, M., Boike, J. & Hostert, P. (2022): Arctic shrub expansion revealed by Landsat-derived multitemporal vegetation cover fractions in the Western Canadian Arctic. Remote Sensing of Environment, 2022, 281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2022.113228

Further information
For further information, please see the publication or contact Leon Nill (leon.nill@geo.hu-berlin.de).
A web-visualization of this dataset is available here.