Deciduous Fractional Cover and Tree Canopy Cover for Boreal North America, 1992-2015

This dataset holds deciduous fraction and tree canopy cover at 30-m resolution over the North American boreal domain for 1992 to 2015. Deciduous fraction is the areal percentage of deciduous trees relative to all tree canopy cover within a pixel, and tree canopy cover is the areal percentage of a pixel that is covered by tree canopy. Deciduous fraction values are valid only for pixels with tree canopy cover >25 percent. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)-based median-value image composites were derived from Landsat 5, 7, and 8 Collection 1 surface reflectance datasets for years 1987-1997, 1998-2002, 2003-2007, 2008-2012, and 2013-2018 to create composites for nominal years 1992, 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015, respectively. These image composites were prepared for early spring, mid-summer, and mid-to-late fall seasons to identify key differences in deciduous and evergreen green-up amplitudes. Random Forest (RF) regression models were used to derive deciduous fraction and tree canopy cover from the image composites. These models were trained with data from in-situ samples across Alaska and Canada from a variety of studies. Seventy percent of the in-situ samples were used for training and 30% for validation. Per-pixel uncertainty for both deciduous fraction and tree canopy cover are included and were based on one standard deviation of output values across all decision trees in the RF regression. These datasets were developed as part of NASA's ABoVE project to capture forest composition changes over the North American boreal domain across the last several decades. The data are provided in GeoTIFF format.