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 2008 and 2009 and land use and land cover classification data derived from 2009 were used to produce this dataset. The land use and land cover 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 loss data from 2008 to 2009, classified into 9 classes: 1 - exposed land/cut blocks/harvested areas, 3 - transitional bare surfaces, 4 - mixed developed areas, 5 - developed areas, 6 - shoal, 7 - shrub land, 8 - grassland and 9 - agricultural areas. These categories can be used as baseline data for planning, managing and monitoring surface infrastructure needs and impacts.
Process steps performed in ENVI 5.1 to produce this land disturbance 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 2008 and 2009 LBAPC datasets were used to produce this land disturbance result.
2. Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) datasets were produced from the 2008 and 2009 LBAPC datasets.
3. The simple difference based change detection method was applied to the 2008 and 2009 NDBI results using 2008 as the initial state and 2009 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 land disturbance result was derived from positive changes by manually setting the threshold for those pixels in the 14 to 21 range to 1. This threshold was selected to eliminate false positive changes associated with cloud, haze, cloud shadow, and noise.
5. The Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) classification result for 2009 (DIG 2015-0067) was clipped using the land disturbance result from step 4 to classify the land disturbance result.