Development of a circa 2000 land cover map of northern Canada at 30 m resolution from Landsat

Abstract

Previous land cover maps covering northern Canada have been of insufficient spatial or thematic detail to address emerging northern issues such as wildlife habitat, land use planning, and fine-scale land cover dynamics. Mapping northern land cover requires medium-resolution (~30 m) remote sensing data to effectively characterize cover types that are spatially heterogeneous and cannot be consistently represented at coarser (250 m – 1 km) scales. In this paper, we present a land cover map of northern Canada at 30 m spatial resolution suitable for application in northern land use planning, wildlife habitat assessment, and climate change impact assessment and adaption. Orthorectified circa 2000 Landsat data were acquired from the Centre for Topographic Information, with coverage from the treeline to the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, and combined into 16 radiometrically balanced large-area mosaics. A stratified unsupervised cluster labelling approach was used for map generation. Literature on northern land cover and vegetation mapping and numerous northern vegetation surveys were examined to define a land cover legend containing 15 classes. Field data gathered during several campaigns were used in conjunction with other available medium-resolution land cover maps to develop a dataset for training and validation. Standardized accuracy assessment is limited due to the cost of field data acquisition and the small archive of reference data in northern regions. Comparison with field data used only to aid cluster labelling suggests 81.5% accuracy for 76 plots, and examination of subpixel land cover distribution within each 1 km Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map (CAVM) class shows good agreement. The map is publicly available through the Natural Resources Canada Geogratis portal in 1 : 250 000 scale National Topographic System (NTS) map sheets.