Disturbance-Informed Annual Land Cover Classification Maps of Canada's Forested Ecosystems for a 29-Year Landsat Time Series
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Land cover classification of large geographic areas over multiple decades at an annual time step is now possible based upon free and open access to the Landsat data archive. Annual gap-free, best-available-pixel, surface reflectance, image composites and annual forest change maps have been generated for Canada for the years 1984 to 2012. Using these data, we demonstrate the Virtual Land Cover Engine (VLCE), a framework for change-informed annual land cover mapping, over the 650 million ha forested ecosystems of Canada, to produce a 29-year data cube of land cover. Post-processing aimed to reduce spurious class transitions is undertaken integrating change information, land cover transition likelihoods, and year-on-year class membership likelihoods. Validation was assessed for a single year (2005) using independent data for an overall accuracy of 70.3% (± 2.5%). Key results are the detailed capture of trends in land cover, illustration of land cover links to disturbance processes, and insights related to the general stability of land cover over time with stand replacing disturbance followed by regeneration of forests. The portable mapping framework and resultant data products offer an integrated, long baseline, disturbance-informed and detailed depiction of land cover to meet science and program related information needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".