Ground-Based Vegetation Photos for Arctic Tundra Classification

731 nadir photographs document vegetation communities and ground surfaces from the summers of 2014 and 2015. This ground reference data supports classification studies across three distinct areas near Toolik Lake, Alaska. The dataset is associated with the ORNL_CLOUD organization.

Use Cases

• Validating satellite-derived land cover maps for alpine tundra regions.
• Training machine learning models for automated vegetation species identification from imagery.
• Analyzing spatial patterns of vegetation cover and community composition near the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
• Providing ground-truth data for long-term ecological research (LTER) site monitoring.
• Studying the relationship between ground surface characteristics and vegetation types in the Arctic.

Strengths

• Contains 731 precisely geolocated, ground-based photographs for reliable validation.
• Covers three distinct study areas totaling approximately 12 km², providing spatial variety.
• Data collection occurred over two consecutive summer field seasons (2014-2015).

Limitations

• Column names and specific metadata for individual photos are not provided by the sources.
• Sources conflict on the last updated date, reporting both 2015-07-31 and 2026-03-13.
• The specific license terms under 'other-license-specified' are not detailed.

Provenance

Source

ORNL_CLOUD

Collection Method

Ground-based nadir photography of selected field plots.

Time Range

2014-2015

Freshness

2026-03-13 01:43:23.642710

Geography

Three areas near Toolik Lake, Alaska: Toolik (~6 km²), Pipeline (~3 km²), and Imnavait (~3 km²).