Time Series of Kelp Canopy Maps from Planet Dove (Polygon)

This dataset contains monthly kelp canopy extent maps for the California coastline. Products are provided as shapefiles and were originally generated from 3 m Planet Dove GeoTIFF classifications. For each month, at least five cloud-free Planet Dove images were acquired and classified using a VGG16-U-Net model trained to identify four classes: kelp, seawater, land, and waves. Monthly kelp canopy extent was produced with a majority filter: pixels labeled as kelp in at least 50% of the input images were retained in the final composite. For full methodological details, see Cavanaugh et al., “High-resolution Planet Dove data identify local drivers of kelp canopy persistence.” Users should cite this publication when using these data.

Contents and file structure

• One ZIP file per year-month (e.g., YYYY_MM_PlanetDove_KelpPolygon.zip)
• Each ZIP contains two shapefiles (with their associated .shx, .dbf, .prj, etc.):
  1. YYYY_MM_California_KelpCanopy_KelpPresence.shp (polygons indicating mapped kelp canopy for that month).
  2. YYYY_MM_California_KelpCanopy_AreaSurveyed.shp (polygons delineating the area that was surveyed by the model (i.e., locations that were covered by at least 1 Planet Dove image and that were not masked for land or clouds). Areas with no data are excluded from this layer.

Spatial & temporal extent

• Spatial extent: California coastline
• Temporal extent: September for years 2017-2024