Estimating Land Use Change over Canadas Arctic/Sub-Arctic Region

Estimates of land use change (LUC) and resulting greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes in Canada´s North are needed for reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This paper presents a remote sensing based approach and results for estimating non-forest LUC over Canada´s Arctic/sub-Arctic zone. Spatial datasets portraying the occurrence of cultural features were used to identify high probability LUC areas within a 359 million ha northern study region. These targeted areas were analyzed using multi-temporal Landsat satellite imagery from circa 1985, 1990, and 2000. A Land Use Change Mapping System for Canada´s North (LUCMAP-N) was developed by combining several image normalization and change detection techniques recently devised at Natural Resources Canada´s Earth Sciences Sector (NRCan-ESS). It is estimated that the average rate of LUC during 1985-2000 over Canada´s Arctic/sub-Arctic region was 666 ha/yr.