Data from: Landscape variability of vegetation change across the forest to tundra transition of central Canada ...

• Main Author: Bonney, Mitchell
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2024
• Subjects: Tundra
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12788412; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.12788412

Paper Abstract: Widespread increases in the productivity of tundra ecosystems and static trends – or even declines – in boreal ecosystems have been detected since the early 1980s using coarse-scale remote sensing. However, intermediate-scale Landsat studies have shown that these changes are heterogeneous and may be related to landscape and regional variability in climate, land cover, topography and moisture availability. In this study, a Landsat Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time-series (1984–2016) was examined for an area spanning the transition from sub-Arctic boreal forest to Low Arctic tundra in central Canada. This was supplemented by analyses of relationships with a suite of environmental variables and in situ measurements of bulk vegetation volume. Results show that NDVI trends were generally positive (i.e. increasing) across the study area but were smallest in the forest zone and largest in the northern tundra zone. More than one-quarter (27%) of un-masked pixels exhibited a ...