Land cover classification and mapping of a polar desert in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago

The use of remote sensing for developing land cover maps in the Arctic has grown considerably in the last two decades, especially for monitoring the effects of climate change. The main challenge is to link information extracted from satellite imagery to ground covers due to the fine-scale spatial heterogeneity of Arctic ecosystems. There is currently no commonly accepted methodological scheme for high-latitude land cover mapping, but the use of remote sensing in Arctic ecosystem mapping would benefit from a coordinated sharing of lessons learned and best practices. Here, we aimed to produce a highly accurate land cover map of the surroundings of the Canadian Forces Station Alert, a polar desert on the northeastern tip of Ellesmere Island (Nunavut, Canada) by testing different predictors and classifiers. To account for the effect of the bare soil background and water limitations that are omnipresent at these latitudes, we included as predictors soil-adjusted vegetation indices and severa..., The methodology and the land cover classes are described in the related works:
Émilie Desjardins, Sandra Lai, Laurent Houle, Alain Caron, Véronique Thériault, Andrew Tam, François Vézina & Dominique Berteaux (2023) Algorithms and Predictors for Land Cover Classification of Polar Deserts: A Case Study Highlighting Challenges and Recommendations for Future Applications. Remote Sensing, 15:12, 3090, DOI: 10.3390/rs15123090
Émilie Desjardins, Sandra Lai, Serge Payette, François Vézina, Andrew Tam & Dominique Berteaux (2021) Vascular plant communities in the polar desert of Alert (Ellesmere Island, Canada): Establishment of a baseline reference for the 21st century, Écoscience, 28:3-4, 243-267, DOI: 10.1080/11956860.2021.1907974, The dataset includes a shapefile named reference.shp, which consists of a collection of files with a common filename prefix, stored in the same directory. The shapefile stores the location, shape (point in this case), and attribute of the 467 reference points. The attribute of each point includes the land cover class among the following: bareground (refers to forb-dominated barren), mesic (refers to forb-dominated tundra), wetgrass (refers to grass-dominated wetland), wetsedge (refers to sedge-dominated wetland), wetmoss (refers to moss-dominated wetland), water, and snow. The shapefile can be opened in geographic information system (GIS) software such as QGIS (QGIS Development Team) and ArcGIS (ESRI). The geographic coordinate system is NAD 1983 (EPSG:4269) and the projected coordinate system is NAD 1983 UTM Zone 20N (EPSG:26920).
The dataset also includes a file named ensemble_classifier.tif. It is a raster GIS file in GeoTIFF format with 0.5 x 0.5 meter resolution. The uncompressed s...