Cold Lake Oil Sands Land Cover Classification From 2005 Landsat

13 land-use and land-cover classes, including coniferous forest, water bodies, and fire scars, were derived from 2005 Landsat multispectral imagery. The Government of Alberta created this dataset as baseline data for the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan. It covers Township 56 to 69, Range 1 to 11, west of the 4th Meridian.

Use Cases

• Train image segmentation models to identify 'coniferous forest', 'broad leaf forest', and 'mixed forest' classes from multispectral Landsat data.
• Analyze spatial patterns of 'developed areas' and 'agriculture areas' relative to 'water bodies' for regional planning.
• Use the 'fire scar' class as a baseline for studying post-fire vegetation recovery over time.
• Monitor changes in 'shrub land' and 'grassland' cover as indicators of ecosystem health in the oil sands area.

Strengths

• 13 distinct land cover classes provide detailed categorization.
• Derived from Landsat multispectral imagery, a standard source for land cover mapping.
• Covers a defined region of the Cold Lake oil sands area for focused analysis.

Limitations

• Data is from a single year (2005), limiting temporal analysis.
• Class '0 - unclassified' may represent areas of missing or uncertain data.
• Specific accuracy metrics or validation details for the 13 classes are not provided.

Provenance

Source

Government of Alberta

Collection Method

Derived from 2005 Landsat multispectral imagery.

Time Range

2005

Freshness

null

Geography

Cold Lake oil sands area, Township 56 to 69, Range 1 to 11, west of the 4th Meridian, Alberta, Canada.