In 2014, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) initiated a Play-Based Regulation (PBR) pilot project as a step towards implementation of the Unconventional Regulatory Framework. One of the goals of the PBR pilot is to encourage companies in the unconventional play area to work together on plans for surface development to minimize the numbers of facilities and surface impacts. This dataset is one of a series created using earth observation imagery to assess surface change caused by energy exploration.
The PBR area extends from Twp. 52, Rge. 7, W 5th Mer. to Twp. 70, Rge. 5, W 6th Mer., covering the towns of Edson, Fox Creek, Mayerthorpe, Whitecourt, Swan Hills, and Valleyview.
Landsat multispectral imagery for 2006 and 2007 and Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) classification data derived from 2007 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, 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. Pre-release versions of annual Landsat Best Available Pixel Composite (LBAPC) datasets (1984 to 2012) were obtained from the Natural Resources Canada/Pacific Forestry Centre for testing purposes. Of these, the 2006 and 2007 LBAPC datasets were used to produce this vegetation recovery result.
2. Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) datasets were produced from the 2006 and 2007 LBAPC datasets.
3. The simple difference based change detection method was applied to the 2006 and 2007 NDBI results using 2006 as the initial state and 2007 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 2007 (DIG 2015-0037) was clipped using the vegetation recovery result from step 4 to classify the vegetation recovery result.