Monitoring Arctic Permafrost - Crowdsourced Ice-wedge Polygon Center Points

This dataset contains four files of points representing the approximate centers of ice-wedge polygons in two different regions:

Cape Blossom (CB), located on Baldwin Peninsula in western Alaska, USA

"Blueberry Hills" (BH), located in the Mackenzie river delta north of Aklavik, Northwest Territories, Canada

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) datasets were collected by volunteer contributors of the UndercoverEisAgenten project (funded by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research), using a bespoke web application for crowd-sourced mapping. Volunteers contributed primarily in the frame of workshops at schools and universities organized as mapping events ("mapathons"). The participants consisted of university level Geography students in Germany (two mapping events) and the Netherlands (one mapping event) and school students in grades 7–12 (approximate age range 12-18 years, seven mapping events) in German Higher Secondary Education (Gymnasium). Contributions to the mapping projects were made from a total number of 105 distinct user accounts. Participants were instructed to mark the approximate centroids of ice-wedge polygons within the respective boundaries of each task area. Each task was assigned to more than one contributor.

Along with the VGI data, an additional set of polygon center points in the same two study areas was contributed by experts for the purpose of quality assessment. The research areas were analyzed by three creators of this dataset with the help of GIS software.

Both volunteers and experts identified ice-wedge polygon centers based on aerial imagery datasets of permafrost landscape acquired by the Modular Camera System (CB) and a high-resolution UAV orthomosaic (BH) acquired together with students of Moose Kerr School, Aklavik, NWT, Canada.