ABoVE: Riverbank Erosion and Vegetation Changes, Yukon River Basin, Alaska, 1984-2017

• Main Author: BROWN, D.R.N.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: ORNL Distributed Active Archive Center 2019
• Subjects: Yukon; Yukon river; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.3334/ornldaac/1616; https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1616

This dataset provides a time series of riverbank erosion and vegetation colonization along reaches of the Yukon River (3 study areas), Tanana and Nenana Rivers (1 area), and Chandalar River (1 area) in interior Alaska over the period 1984-2017. The change data were derived from selected 30-m images from Landsat TM, Landsat ETM+, and Landsat Operational Land Imager (OLI) surface reflectance products. Image classification used the Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index (NDVI) with an NDVI threshold of 0.2 to differentiate vegetated from non-vegetated pixels. Images were assigned to one of seven or eight multiyear intervals, within the 1984-2017 overall range, for each study area. Time intervals vary by study site. Change detection identified shifts from one time interval to the next: changes from vegetated to non-vegetated classes were considered riverbank erosion and changes from non-vegetated to vegetated classes were considered vegetation colonization.