The Cold Lake oil sands area - Township 56 to 69, Range 1 to 11, west of the 4th Meridian, falls within the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan (LARP). As part of Alberta’s Land-use Framework, LARP was developed in 2012 to set the stage for robust growth, vibrant communities and a healthy environment within the region. One of its implementation objectives is to balance the economic development of oil sands and impacts on the ecosystem and environment. This is to be achieved through enhanced science-based monitoring for improved characterization of the environment and to collect the information necessary to understand cumulative effects.
Landsat multispectral imagery for 2012 and 2013 and Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) classification data derived from 2013 were used to produce this dataset. The LULC changes include vegetation loss from anthropogenic disturbances, such as infrastructure related to oil and gas exploration, forestry and agriculture, and vegetation recovery from these disturbances.
This digital data release contains the vegetation recovery data from 2012 to 2013, classified into 6 classes: 1 - shrub land, 2 - grassland, 3 - agricultural areas, 4 - coniferous forest, 5 - broadleaf forest and 6 - mixed forest.
Process steps performed in ENVI 5.1 to produce this vegetation recovery classification dataset:
1. Publicly available annual Landsat Best Available Pixel Composite (LBAPC) datasets for 2012 and 2013 were obtained from the Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland to produce this vegetation recovery result.
2. Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) datasets were produced from the 2012 and 2013 LBAPC datasets.
3. The simple difference based change detection method was applied to the 2012 and 2013 NDBI results using 2012 as the initial state and 2013 as the final state. The change detection result contains classes ranked from 0 to 21, where lower numbers indicate a strong negative change and higher numbers indicate a strong positive change. Intermediate values indicate little to no change.
4. The net vegetation recovery result was derived from negative changes by manually setting the threshold for those pixels in the 5 to 10 range to 1. This threshold was selected to eliminate false negative changes associated with cloud, haze, cloud shadow, and noise.
5. The Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) classification result for 2013 (DIG 2015-0071) was clipped using the vegetation recovery result from step 4 to classify the vegetation recovery result.