Total and tall shrub cover on the North Slope of Alaska

To monitor changes in shrub cover, aid field studies, and inform ecosystem models, shrub cover was mapped across the North Slope of Alaska. This data set consists of maps of total and tall (>1m height) shrub cover on the North Slope of Alaska, expressed in percent ground cover and at 30 m ground resolution. Images from IKONOS and SPOT satellite sensors detected tall and short shrub presences at high resolution (<5 m grid cells). These were then used to train a Random Forest regression algorithm to map total and tall shrub cover, expressed as a percent of the total surface area, at 30 m resolution from a mosaic of Landsat scenes. The final shrub cover maps correspond well with field measurements (r 2 = 0.7, root mean square error = 17%, N = 24) and compared well with the existing vegetation type maps of the study area and a gridded temperature data set not used in the map generation. Details are given in: Beck, P. S. A., N. Horning, S. J. Goetz, M. M. Loranty, and K. Tape (2011), Shrub cover on the North Slope of Alaska: a circa 2000 baseline map, Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, 43(3), 355-363, doi: 10.1657/1938-4246-43.3.355. Files in both ERDAS IMAGINE Image (.img) and GeoTIFF formats are provided.