Comprehensive baseline inventory of Alaskan buildings and roads detected from 0.5 meter resolution satellite imagery (2018-2023) of communities and supplemented by OpenStreetMap

This dataset is a comprehensive inventory of Alaskan buildings, storage tanks, and roads that were: (1) detected from 0.5 meter resolution satellite imagery of communities (acquired between 2018-2023) and (2) supplemented by OpenStreetMap data. We created HABITAT (High-resolution Arctic Built Infrastructure and Terrain Analysis Tool), a deep learning-based, high-performance computing-enabled mapping pipeline to automatically detect buildings and roads from high-resolution Maxar satellite imagery across the Arctic region. Shapefiles beginning with "HABITAT_AK" contain only the post-processed deep learning predictions. Shapefiles beginning with "HABITAT_OSM" contain the post-processed deep learning predictions supplemented by OpenStreetMap data. The HABITAT pipeline is based on a ResNet50-UNet++ semantic segmentation architecture trained on a training dataset comprised of building and road footprint polygons manually digitized from Maxar satellite imagery across the circumpolar Arctic (including Alaska, Russia, and Canada). The code is made available at https://github.com/PermafrostDiscoveryGateway/HABITAT. From imagery of 285 Alaskan communities acquired between 2018-2023, we detected approximately 250,000 buildings and storage tanks (comprising a 41.76 million square meter footprint) and 15 million meters of road. Building (including storage tanks) footprint polygons and road centerlines were strictly mapped within the boundaries of Alaskan communities (both incorporated places and census designated places). After the deep learning model detected building and road footprints, post-processing was performed to smooth out building footprints, extract centerlines from road footprints, and remove falsely-detected infrastructure. In particular, a buffer is created around developed land cover identified by the 2016 Alaska National Land Cover Database map, and model predictions that fall outside of the buffer are assumed to be confused with non-infrastructure land cover. Finally, we selected buildings and roads from the OpenStreetMap Alaska dataset (downloaded in June 2024 from https://download.geofabrik.de/) that do not intersect with any deep learning predictions to generate a merged OSM and HABITAT infrastructure dataset. This merged product comprises a total building footprint of 53 million square meters and a road network of 63,744 km across the state of Alaska.