Shapefile of beaver ponds for a watershed (02JB) located in the region of Abitibi [Quebec, Canada]

The following archive contains a shapefile of 10855 polygons corresponding to beaver ponds with a minimum mapping size of 500 m2. All these polygons are within a watershed (47,880743 -78,717634) located in Abibiti, Québec, Canada.

Beaver ponds were delineated using the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) over PlanetScope 3m spatial resolution scenes. The NDWI yields an index that ranges between -1 and 1, where open-water pixels approach 1 and terrestrial pixels -1. To set the threshold for water pixels, the Otsu adaptive threshold was used, the optimal threshold is identified by minimizing the inter-class variance and maximizing the intra-class variance.