Fine-resolution mapping and assessment of artificial surfaces in the northern hemisphere permafrost environments

ABSTRACT

Permafrost degradation has strong and long-lasting effects on anthropogenic land-use activities, contradicting the goal of sustainable development in polar and high-elevation regions. The artificial surface (AS) plays a central role in determining human-environment relationships in permafrost environments. Despite recent progress in monitoring land surfaces, attempts to map permafrost AS with satellite remote sensing have been limited. In this study, we propose an operational framework for fine-resolution mapping and assessment of permafrost AS across the entire Northern Hemisphere landmass. The proposed framework was designed to take advantage of prior knowledge obtained from existing global-scale land-cover products. As a result, a 10 m resolution permafrost AS map for 2016–2017 was created using a locally adaptive classification strategy. We found that the created map exhibited an overall accuracy of 91.7 ± 2.1% with minimum accuracies > 70%. We estimated that the total area of permafrost AS in the Northern Hemisphere was approximately 9,000 km², most notably in the Russian Arctic. Future projections indicate that there will be over one-seventh of the permafrost AS area at high geohazard risk by the end of the twenty-first century. Our study provides new perspectives on the ‘permafrost-human-climate’ nexus, which can advance our understanding of the terrestrial system.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial surface
• permafrost
• land-cover mapping
• remote sensing

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41925027), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42371344), the Open Research Program of the International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals (CBAS2022ORP04), and Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (2022A1515010924). The authors would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data supporting this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.