ALBERT

Description: This Sentinel-2 Level-2 (Bottom-of-Atmosphere) image patches with seasonal information for Central Yakutia and Chukotka vegetation plots dataset in Siberia, Russia, is a part of the SiDroForest data collection. The aim of SiDroForest is to map current vegetation dynamics in the boreal to sub arctic region of Siberia. Sentinel-2 is an ESA optical satellite mission providing satellite imagery globally- and freely-available, which facilitates low-cost large-scale analyses of circumpolar boreal forests. The Sentinel-2 mission is composed of two identical satellites that were launched in 2015 and 2017. Though freely available, Sentinel-2 data often contains clouds and finding a cloud and haze-free acquisition can take time. Therefore, this Data Collection provides cloud free atmospherically corrected image patches of the vegetation plots in three different seasons of the vegetation period in Siberia: early summer, peak summer and summer. The atmospherically corrected Sentinel-2 data were optimized prior to vegetation related analyses: we resampled the spectral bands to 10 m spatial resolution to make them comparable in the same spatial pixel resolution, removing the 60m bands that support atmospheric correction but are not optimal for land surface classification. In addition, for vegetation monitoring it is common to apply the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) that we provide as an additional band. The dataset presented here contains subsets of Sentinel-2 acquisitions that cover all the 54 locations where fieldwork was performed in Siberia during a 2-month fieldwork expedition in 2018 by the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany (Kruse et al., 2019). 30 by 30m image patches were cropped and given a vegetation label (classes 1-11).