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- Arctic greening is the growth of vegetation in the arctic tundra attributed to increased melting of permafrost due to global warming trends. According to a study led by Junchang Ju and Jeffery Masek, from 1984–2012, 29.4% of Canada and Alaska, has shown positive greening, while 2.9% showed negative browning (Ju et al., 2016.) Our data will focus on the Alaskan tundra, latitude 69 longitude -147, by the town of Sagwon.
- Alaska is an appealing location to study because of the availability of data and valuable research in the Alaskan tundra biome. Due to the petroleum formation discoveries with commercial quantity in the state, oil and gas companies have relocated their workers to carry out oil and gas exploration and production development in the region, this increase of population leads to an increase of interest in the area. Furthermore, the melting of Alaskan tundra and greening of the biome can be correlated with rising temperatures leading to ice melt, which can be shown with change detection techniques. Lastly, there have been extensive studies in the area that indicate that the Alaskan tundra has relatively lower greening than the Canadian tundra, so our group feels this is an excellent location for further study (Ju et al., 2016.).
- For data acquisition, we used the 30-m Landsat multispectral data and the thermal bands; specifically Landsat 7 and Landsat 8, for our data processing and change detection. The Landsat sensor has sufficient temporal resolution (16-day orbit) over a large area coverage, appropriate for studying natural changes. Landsat datasets are precisely georeferenced, consistently calibrated, and hence, provides reliable surface reflectance.
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