Synthesized Inventory of Relevant Infrastructure and Utilized Areas, Including Contaminated Sites (SIRIUS)

The SIRIUS inventory integrates data from

OpenStreetMap for infrastructure and land use information (OpenStreetMap Contributors and Geofabrik GmbH, 2018),

the modeled Northern Hemisphere permafrost map by Obu et al. (2018),

the contaminated sites database and reports by the State of Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (2023) (DEC),

the inventory of contaminated sites in Canada by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (FCSI) (2024),

a compilation of contaminated sites in Greenland and Norway from the NGO Robin des Bois (2009a, 2009b) (RdB), 

locations of drilling mud sumps in the Northwest Territories of Canada by GeoNorth Ltd. and Kokelj (2002),

projections of the timing of first talik formation, a model output from the CryoGridLite permafrost model (Langer et al., 2024)

for the Arctic regions of Alaska (AK), Canada (CA), Greenland (GL), and Norway (NO). 

This dataset is provided as a GeoPackage, enabling seamless integration with spatial databases (e.g., PostgreSQL/PostGIS), Geographic Information Systems (e.g., QGIS), and geospatial processing libraries (e.g., Python's GeoPandas). All layers can be queried either independently or in combination with one another.

The GeoPackage contains 18 separate layers. 

The contaminated sites layers contain detailed information on contaminants haromized into chemical classifications based on the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). Additionally, each layer includes projections of talik formation as complementary attributes. These projections are provided for SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios, specifying the 5th, 50th (median), and 95th percentiles of the year when talik formation is expected to occur for the first time.  

The layers of the infrastructure and human-impacted areas are further divided into points of interest (POI), polygonal infrastructure, and linear road and rail networks (RRNetwork) for each country (AK, CA, GL, and NO). The permafrost extent is provided as a single pan-Arctic layer.

Contaminated Sites:

AK_ContaminatedSites_DEC

CA_ContaminatedSites_FCSI

GL_ContaminatedSites_RdB

NO_ContaminatedSites_RdB

Infrastructure and Human-Impacted Areas:

NO_POI_InfrastructureHIElements_OSM

NO_InfrastructureHIElements_OSM

NO_InfrastructureHIElements_RRNetwork_OSM

GL_POI_InfrastructureHIElements_OSM

GL_InfrastructureHIElements_OSM

GL_InfrastructureHIElements_RRNetwork_OSM

AK_POI_InfrastructureHIElements_OSM

AK_InfrastructureHIElements_OSM

AK_InfrastructureHIElements_RRNetwork_OSM

CA_POI_InfrastructureHIElements_OSM

CA_InfrastructureHIElements_OSM

CA_InfrastructureHIElements_RRNetwork_OSM

CA_DrillingMudSumps_KokeljGeoNorth

Permafrost Extent:

PermafrostZones_UiO

Download Data

pan-arctic_SIRIUS_v1.0.gpkg