[Dataset]: Potential vegetation layers

[MattF-NSIDC]

Dataset URL

TODO

Rationale

@trey-stafford to populate

[trey-stafford]

Gerald Frost gave a presentation at the Mapping the Arctic conference in Nuuk about vegetation change in the Arctic. I have a few notes about potential sources of data, although I have no idea how accessible these data actually are! Here are my notes:

• Arctic bioclimatic subzones, Walker et al 2005
• Bioclimatic subzones, Raynolds et al 2019
• Max seasonal NDVI trends from MODIS (in 2022 arctic report card)
• Tundra fires occurring in places with no known history of fire (Greenland!). Are there datasets on polar wildfires? Masuer et al maybe. There's MODIS identified wildfires.

The conference is planning to publish a booklet of abstracts and slide decks (I think) from the conference soon, so we might get some additional ideas directly from the source once that's published.

[trey-stafford]

Link to Gerald's slides: https://dtu.events/aitc2023/download-zip?data=350458

[trey-stafford]

Potential dataset: Raster Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map

Dataset (GeoTiff) can be downloaded here: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/c4xj5rv6kv/1 Relevant paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425719303165?via%3Dihub

This map shows land cover classes for various bioclimatic zones in the Arctic. Unfortunately it is not clear what the raster's data values map to. The metadata is limited and some of it seems to be stored in an ArcGIS proprietary format (.lyr). I'm guessing the symbology/legend is in the .lyr data. Planning to look at the paper more closely and also investigate if I can open the .lyr file in ArcGIS online.

I found v2 of the dataset, which includes a csv file that maps raster data values to vegetation categories here: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/c4xj5rv6kv/2

Associated PR: https://github.com/nsidc/qgreenland/pull/592

[trey-stafford]

Potential dataset: Arctic Report Card 2022: Tundra Greenness

• https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2022/ArtMID/8054/ArticleID/986/Tundra-Greenness
• https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/48547

Unfortunately there does not appear to be a link to the data itself. Perhaps I can ask Gerald about this to see if it is accessible as a raster dataset (he's one of the authors on this report).

[trey-stafford]

There are some other potential layers we could consider from the original Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map (CAVM) as well: https://www.arcticatlas.org/maps/catalog/index

E.g,

• Circumpolar Arctic Bioclimate Subzones
• Circumpolar Arctic Physiography
• Circumpolar Arctic Floristic Provinces
• Circumpolar Arctic Coastline and Treeline Boundary
• Circumpolar Arctic Substrate Chemistry
• Circumpolar Arctic NDVI and Phytomass

Note these are all 'older' datasets (2003) and some data links seem to be broken (e.g., the coastline geotiff is link is broken)

[trey-stafford]

I emailed Gerald about the Tundra Greenness dataset and for any other suggestions he might have for QGreenland. Will update when/if I hear back!

[trey-stafford]

Gerald got back to us and indicated that a repository containing data on NDVI trends will be ready soon from ORNL-DAAC. This might not be available in time for v3, but perhaps a future release!

Gerald also mentioned that MODIS data that the NDVI trends are based on is already available. It is possible that we could write some code to fetch MODIS data, compute e.g., monthly NDVI, and then produce trends from that. This seems like a pretty big lift for us to accomplish right now though.

[MattF-NSIDC]

This doesn't look like it's going to fit in v3.