Lidar hillshade derived degraded ice wedge polygon extent for area of discontinuous permafrost in Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska, USA,1:2000 (2024-2025)

A map of degraded ice wede polygon terrain for the lidar mapped portion of the Fairbanks North Star Borough. The purpose of this mapping effort is to identify areas with massive ice present. Mapping of high ground-ice content areas was conducted by manually digitizing ice wedge polygon terrain at a scale of 1:2000 using lidar data. Lidar data covering 2,208 square kilometers (km²) of the Fairbanks North Star Borough (FNSB) were acquired in 2018 from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Elevation tiles with 1 meter (m) spatial resolution were downloaded from the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys (https://elevation.alaska.gov/). A hillshade mosaic was generated in ArcGIS Pro and used to identify areas of ice wedge polygon degradation, which appear as surface grids of ~10 m wide polygons. A limitation of this mapping approach is that massive ground ice may occur without a surface expression, and thus our mapped extent should be considered conservative. The dataset is provided in the Alaska Albers NAD83 coordinate system.