Land Cover Classification Map of Alberta Cold Lake Oil Sands Region

Thirteen distinct land cover classes, including coniferous forest, water bodies, and fire scars, are mapped across the Cold Lake oil sands area. This raster dataset was created by the Government of Alberta from 2008 Landsat satellite imagery to support regional environmental planning.

Use Cases

• Quantify the spatial extent of classes like 'fire scar' and 'mixed forest' to assess environmental disturbance and recovery.
• Train a semantic segmentation model to identify 'water bodies' and 'developed areas' from Landsat imagery.
• Analyze the distribution of 'shrub land' versus 'grassland' classes for habitat and biodiversity studies.
• Monitor changes in 'exposed land/cut blocks' over time by comparing this 2008 baseline with newer classifications.

Strengths

• Contains 13 distinct land cover classes for detailed analysis.
• Derived from authoritative Landsat satellite imagery.
• Covers a defined geographic region (Townships 56 to 69, Ranges 1 to 11) within Alberta's Lower Athabasca Regional Plan.

Limitations

• Data is from a single year (2008), limiting temporal trend analysis.
• The 'unclassified' class (0) may represent areas of poor data quality or missing labels.

Provenance

Source

Government of Alberta

Collection Method

Derived from 2008 Landsat satellite imagery.

Time Range

2008

Freshness

null

Geography

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