Cold Lake Oil Sands Land Cover Classification from 2006 Landsat

13 land-use and land-cover classes characterize the Cold Lake oil sands region, derived from 2006 Landsat satellite imagery. The Government of Alberta created this raster dataset to support science-based environmental monitoring under the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan. It was last updated in the platform's catalog on March 4, 2026.

Use Cases

• Train image segmentation models to identify 'coniferous forest', 'broad leaf forest', and 'mixed forest' classes from satellite imagery.
• Analyze spatial patterns of 'developed areas', 'mixed developed areas', and 'agriculture areas' relative to oil sands activity.
• Monitor environmental change by comparing the 'fire scar' and 'transitional bare surfaces' classes with more recent imagery.
• Assess watershed health by mapping the distribution and proximity of 'water bodies' and 'shoal' features to industrial sites.
• Quantify land disturbance by calculating the area of 'exposed land/cut blocks/harvested areas' within the region.

Strengths

• Provides a detailed 13-class land cover taxonomy specific to the boreal and oil sands region.
• Derived from authoritative Landsat satellite imagery, a standard source for remote sensing.
• Covers a defined geographic area (Townships 56-69, Ranges 1-11, W4M) within a major regulatory plan boundary.

Limitations

• The classification is based on single-year 2006 imagery, making it temporally stale for analyzing recent changes.
• The 'unclassified' class indicates areas where the classification algorithm had uncertain or low confidence.
• Specific metrics on spatial resolution, accuracy assessment, or dataset size are not provided in the description.

Provenance

Source

Government of Alberta.

Collection Method

Derived from 2006 Landsat satellite imagery.

Time Range

2006.

Freshness

The underlying imagery is from 2006; the 2026 date reflects a platform metadata update.

Geography

Cold Lake oil sands area, Alberta, Canada (Townships 56 to 69, Ranges 1 to 11, west of the 4th Meridian).