Data from: Using Landsat time-series to investigate nearly 50 years of tree canopy cover change across an urban-rural landscape in southern Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Paper Abstract: Canadian urban and adjacent landscapes have been dynamic over the last 50 years due to land management, land cover alternations, climate change, and disturbances. Remote sensing, particularly the Landsat archive, provides the only means to spatially quantify these long-term dynamics locally. Here, we explore the utility of Landsat, including the often-forgotten MSS sensor, for investigating percent tree canopy cover (TCC) change between 1972 and 2020 in a Canadian urban-rural context. We build a TCC time-series by training random forest models using visually interpreted TCC from high-resolution imagery. Predictors include topographic and yearly LandsatLinkr-harmonized and LandTrendr-fitted tasseled cap indices. Yearly binary TCC maps are built to mask consistently treeless areas and limit noise. To increase confidence in observed TCC change without historical reference imagery, we investigate multiple temporal validation options. Our TCC time-series (R2: 0.89, RMSE: 10.7%), quantifies TCC dynamics while limiting erroneous change and predictor space extrapolation. We explore TCC changes across landscapes, revealing periods of gain and loss associated with agricultural reforestation (1978-1996), housing development (on-going), drought (late 1990s), emerald ash borer (2010s), an ice storm (2013), and other drivers. Results demonstrate how long-term Landsat time-series can be used to better understand historical tree canopy change at local-regional scales. Dataset details: cc_72to20.tif: Yearly tree CC predictions (1972-2020) always_nonforest10_nowater.tif: continuous-non-canopy mask water.tif: water mask Yearly.zip: Annual predictors (including CC10) and asc outputs See paper: Full article: Using Landsat time-series to investigate nearly 50 years of tree canopy cover change across an urban-rural landscape in southern Ontario See code on GitHub: ZZMitch/PredictTreeCC_Landsat_1972to2020: Code from the portion of my PhD about using Landsat time-series to predict tree canopy cover from 1972 - 2020. Code will be released as papers are published. (github.com) If you use these data, please reference: Bonney, M.T., He, Y., 2024. Using Landsat time-series to investigate nearly 50 years of tree canopy cover change across an urban-rural landscape in southern Ontario. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing 51, https://doi.org/10.1080/07038992.2024.2445836.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".