Total and tall shrub cover on the North Slope of Alaska

This data set consists of maps of total and tall (>1m height) shrub cover on the North Slope of Alaska, expressed in percent ground cover and at 30 m ground resolution. Images from IKONOS and SPOT satellite sensors detected tall and short shrub presences at high resolution (<5 m grid cells).

These were then used to train a Random Forest regression algorithm to map total and tall shrub cover, expressed as a percent of the total surface area, at 30 m resolution from a mosaic of Landsat scenes. The final shrub cover maps correspond well with field measurements (r 2 = 0.7, root mean square error = 17%, N = 24) and compared well with the existing vegetation type maps of the study area and a gridded temperature data set not used in the map generation.