Land Cover Classification Raster for Cold Lake Oil Sands Region

2009 land-use and land-cover classifications derived from Landsat imagery for the Cold Lake oil sands area in Alberta. The Government of Alberta created this raster dataset, which contains 13 distinct land cover classes. It supports the monitoring objectives of the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan.

Use Cases

• Train a semantic segmentation model to classify satellite imagery into 13 land cover classes such as water bodies, coniferous forest, and developed areas.
• Analyze the spatial distribution of land cover types like shrub land, grassland, and fire scars relative to oil sands development footprints.
• Establish a 2009 baseline for change detection studies by comparing this classification with newer imagery to monitor transitions in classes like harvested areas or mixed forest.
• Assess regional ecosystem composition by calculating the area coverage of classes including agriculture areas, broad leaf forest, and transitional bare surfaces.

Strengths

• Contains 13 distinct, defined land cover classes including specific categories for fire scar and mixed developed areas.
• Geographically focused on a defined region: Township 56 to 69, Range 1 to 11, west of the 4th Meridian in Alberta.

Limitations

• Single temporal snapshot from 2009, limiting analysis of recent land-use changes or trends.
• Class '0 - unclassified' may represent areas of poor data quality or ambiguity, reducing usable area for analysis.
• Specific spatial resolution, row/column counts, and dataset size are not provided in the description.

Provenance

Source

Government of Alberta

Collection Method

Derived from 2009 Landsat imagery.

Time Range

2009

Freshness

Metadata was updated in March 2026, but the underlying image data is from 2009.

Geography

Cold Lake oil sands area, Alberta, Canada (Townships 56-69, Ranges 1-11, W4M).