Remote Sensing Baseline for Long-term Monitoring of the Arctic Circumpolar Coastal Observatory Network (ACCO-Net)

The Arctic Circum-Polar Coastal Observatory Network (ACCO-Net) proposes to establish a network of Arctic coastal observatories within the framework and time-span of the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008. These observatories combine studies of coastal dynamics, biodiversity and sociology in a legacy over the following decade, as envisioned by the International Conference on Arctic Research Planning II in the fall of 2005. Remotely sensed data is a cornerstone of the network, since it provides a standardized basis for comparison of observatory sites within the network and since it establishes a initial baseline for monitoring change in the coastal zone. The observatories become a legacy of IPY, supported initially by the Arctic Coastal Dynamics (ACD) project, a five-year project of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), the International Permafrost Association (IPA) and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program project: Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (IGBP-LOICZ), insuring that this baseline will have relevance for the next International Polar Year.
The specific objectives of the project are to:

• Eestablish the rates and magnitudes of erosion and accumulation of Arctic coasts;
• Develop a network of long-term monitoring sites including local community-based observational sites;
• Identify and undertake focused research on critical processes;
• Estimate the amount of sediments and organic carbon derived from coastal erosion;
• Refine and apply an Arctic coastal classification (includes ground ice, permafrost, geology, etc.) in digital form (GIS format);
• Compile, analyze and apply existing information on relevant environmental forcing parameters (e.g. wind speed, sea level, fetch, sea ice etc.);
• Develop empirical models to assess the sensitivity of Arctic coasts to environmental variability and human impacts;
• Produce a series of thematic and derived maps (e.g. coastal classification, ground-ice, sensitivity etc.);

Within the ACCO/Net framework, the proposed application will build on standardized EO data to achieve the following goals:

• To collect EO datasets over loci affected by dynamic coastal processes in order to provide a reference for comparison with the future.
• To use standardized extracted terrain datasets to model coastline evolution at these location.
• To map permafrost, thermokarst and other geomorphological features sensitive to abrupt climatic changes using standardised multispectral datasets.
• To quantify sediment output and terrigenous carbon release by coastal erosion by comparing archive datasets to the ones requested in this study.
• To provide a reliable tool for northern communities to observe coastal erosion and to understand its impacts at the circum-arctic scale.

The project aims on the acquisition of high-resolution remote sensing data from various sensors, which will serve as a homogeneous baseline for all study sites for comparison with data stocks of older data (aerial imagery, CORONA imagery, Landsat data) and potential future datasets. Therefore, for each site the acquisition of a high quality image from both ALOS PRISM and AVNIR-2 sensors is desired. Additionally, the provision of archived SPOT scenes (if available) and the acquisition of a new high quality SPOT scene for each site are desired.

• ALOS PRISM: will be used as a high-resolution (2.5 m) baseline dataset; additionally, DEM will be derived for the characterization and quantification of landscapes and processes
• ALOS AVNIR-2: will be used for land cover and terrain classification
• SPOT archived scenes: will be used for multi-temporal analyses and change detection
• SPOT new scenes: will be used for multi-temporal analyses, change detection, and land cover classification