Contemporary (2016 - 2020) land cover classification across West Antarctica and the McMurdo Dry Valleys

We present here the land cover classification across West Antarctica and the McMurdo Dry Valley produced from Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images of six proglacial regions of Antarctica at 30 m resolution, with an overall accuracy of 77.0 % for proglacial land classes. We conducted this classification using an unsupervised K-means clustering approach, which circumvented the need for training data and was highly effective at picking up key land classes, such as vegetation, water, and different sedimentary surfaces.

This work is supported by the Leeds-York-Hull Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) Panorama under grant NE/S007458/1. The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic project VAN 1/2022 and the Czech Antarctic Foundation funded fieldwork that contributed to part of this work.

Alternate title: Polar Data Centre (PDC) record GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01652

Date (Publication): 2022-07-14

Citation identifier: http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/dms/metadata.php?id= / GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01652

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Antarctic Survey		pdc@bas.ac.uk	Custodian
NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre	Stringer, C.	pdc@bas.ac.uk	Originator

Maintenance and update frequency: Unknown

Keywords

NDGO0001

NERC OAI Harvesting

NERC_DDC

GCMD Parameter Valids

EARTH SCIENCE > Biosphere > Vegetation
EARTH SCIENCE > Land Surface > Erosion/Sedimentation
EARTH SCIENCE > Land Surface > Land Use/Land Cover
EARTH SCIENCE > Land Surface > Land Use/Land Cover > Land Cover

BAS Free-text keywords

Antarctica
Google Earth Engine
Land cover
Landsat
Sediment
Vegetation

Use limitation: This data is covered by a UK Open Government Licence ( http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/)

Access constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: This data is covered by a UK Open Government Licence ( http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/)

Language: English

Topic category

Environment
Geoscientific information
Imagery base maps earth cover

Begin date: 2016-02-02

End date: 2020-02-09

Reference system identifier: OGP / urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG::4326

Distribution format

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
Polar Data Centre - British Antarctic Survey		pdc@bas.ac.uk	Distributor

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
http		GET DATA

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Domain consistency

Measure identification: INSPIRE / Conformity_001

Conformance result

Title: INSPIRE Data Specification on unknown theme Guidelines

Date

Explanation: See the referenced specification

Pass: No

Statement: Accuracy assessed using the methods of:

Olofsson, P., Foody, G. M., Stehman, S. V, and Woodcock, C. E.: Making better use of accuracy data in land change studies: Estimating accuracy and area and quantifying uncertainty using stratified estimation, Remote Sens. Environ., 129, 122-131, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2012.10.031, 2013.

Olofsson, P., Foody, G. M., Herold, M., Stehman, S. V, Woodcock, C. E., and Wulder, M. A.: Good practices for estimating area and assessing accuracy of land change, Remote Sens. Environ., 148, 42-57, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2014.02.015, 2014.

We found our classification to have an overall accuracy of 95.9 % overall. When just the proglacial land classes are considered, we have an accuracy of 77.0 %.