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Full catalog/Alaska_Lake_Pond_Maps_2134
Alaska_Lake_Pond_Maps_2134·v1·dataset

Where Alaska's lakes and ponds are (2019-2021)

ABoVE: Lake and Pond Extents in Alaskan Boreal and Tundra Subregions, 2019-2021
hydrosphere NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 2 Shapefile
In plain English

What it measures. Maps of where lakes and ponds sit across parts of Interior Alaska's boreal forest and a tundra region, down to small ponds about the size of a tennis court.

How it's made. Created by running a deep-learning model over high-resolution PlanetScope satellite imagery (plus elevation data) to detect open water in cloud-free images from 2019 to 2021.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for tracking how Arctic and boreal water bodies grow, shrink, or shift over time, which matters for permafrost, wildlife habitat, and carbon studies.

What's measured

TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SURFACE WATER › SURFACE WATER FEATURES › LAKES/RESERVOIRSBIOSPHERE › ECOSYSTEMS › TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS › FORESTSBIOSPHERE › ECOSYSTEMS › TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS › ALPINE/TUNDRABIOSPHERE › ECOSYSTEMS › FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS › LAKE/POND

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2019-05-19 → 2021-09-28
  • Measured byPlanetScope (PlanetScope)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • Spatial extent-164.402, 60.7642, -143.836, 67.2081
  • FormatsShapefile
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Follow rainfall, floods and surface-water extent
  • Track soil moisture and the onset of drought
  • Monitor lakes, rivers and groundwater storage
Official description

This dataset provides polygon spatial files of lake and pond extents for three sub-regions of Interior Alaska's boreal forest, and one tundra region located in Alaska's Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Files provide lake and pond extents of standing water without wetland vegetation or other obstructions with a minimum area of 0.01 ha. Water extents were derived from Planet Labs PlanetScope imagery with resolution of 3.125 m. A deep learning model (U-Net) was applied to PlanetScope orthotile imagery from Planet Labs' Dove-R and Super Dove satellites. The U-Net model used the red, green, blue, and near-infrared bands along with a slope raster derived from a 30-m digital elevation model (DEM) as inputs. The U-Net detected water bodies in all available cloud-free images from the snow-free period (May-September) of 2019-2021. Water body data are provided as 3-year composites (2019-2021) for all four regions and monthly climatological composites (May-September) over 2019-2021 for the three boreal forest regions. The composite water files indicate the presence of open, standing water in >40% of valid PlanetScope observations for a given composite time-slice. Files are provided in shapefile format.

Get the data

alaska_lake_pond_maps_2134_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="Alaska_Lake_Pond_Maps_2134",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from ORNL_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.