Barrow Area Remote Sensing - Brw Peninsula Land Cover

Cloud free Quickbird satellite imagery was used to develop the land cover maps in this study. The datasets were composed of four multispectral (2.4m) and one panchromatic (0.6m) band.

The multispectral bands were fused with the panchromatic scene using a Principal Components sharpening method, which characteristically maintains spatial and spectral quality (Vijayaraj et al., 2006). Ten land cover types were chosen for the land cover classification. These included seven vegetated land cover types identified from cluster analysis of plot level species cover data from the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) and resampled IBP plots, bare ground, ice/snow/urban areas, and water.