Abstract. Continental-scale land cover information is essential to furthering our understanding of the terrestrial environment, atmosphere and climate change. Several global land cover products have been released in recent years but they typically do not include Antarctica. The lack of land cover data in Antarctica is concerning because mountain glaciers and icecaps there have been losing mass at a rate well above the global average, leading to expansion of proglacial regions. Proglacial regions comprise transient land cover types with high rates of geomorphological activity that delivers sediment into the Southern Ocean and supports its rich biodiversity. With Antarctic mountain glaciers and icecaps projected to lose more mass in the coming decades, and active layer soils expected to increase in thickness, it is timely to establish a baseline land cover dataset for Antarctica with which future classifications can be compared. Here, we use Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images to classify six proglacial regions of Antarctica at 30 m resolution, with an overall accuracy of 77.0 % for proglacial land classes. We conducted this classification using an unsupervised K-means clustering approach, which circumvented the need for training data and was highly effective at picking up key land classes, such as vegetation, water, and different sedimentary surfaces. We have highlighted the spatial pattern in land cover and emphasise a need for more and higher quality field data. The land cover maps produced from this paper are available at: Stringer, C. (2022). Contemporary (2016–2020) land cover classification across West Antarctica and the McMurdo Dry Valleys (Version 1.0) [Data set]. NERC EDS UK Polar Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/5A5EE38C-E296-48A2-85D2-E29DB66E5E24.

中文翻译：

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横跨西南极洲和麦克默多干谷的当代（2016-2020）土地覆盖

摘要。大陆尺度的土地覆盖信息对于进一步了解陆地环境、大气和气候变化至关重要。近年来已经发布了几种全球土地覆盖产品，但它们通常不包括南极洲。南极洲缺乏土地覆盖数据令人担忧，因为那里的山地冰川和冰盖正在以远高于全球平均水平的速度流失，导致冰川前地区的扩张。冰川前地区包括具有高速率地貌活动的瞬时土地覆盖类型，将沉积物输送到南大洋并支持其丰富的生物多样性。随着南极山地冰川和冰盖在未来几十年内预计将失去更多的质量，预计活动层土壤的厚度将增加，现在是建立南极洲基线土地覆盖数据集的时候了，未来的分类可以与之进行比较。在这里，我们使用 Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) 图像以 30 m 的分辨率对南极洲的六个前冰期区域进行分类，对前冰期陆地类别的总体准确率为 77.0%。我们使用无监督的 K-means 聚类方法进行了这种分类，该方法避免了对训练数据的需求，并且在提取关键土地类别（如植被、水和不同的沉积表面）方面非常有效。我们强调了土地覆盖的空间格局，并强调需要更多、更高质量的实地数据。本文制作的土地覆盖图可在以下网址获取：Stringer, C. (2022)。南极洲西部和麦克默多干谷（1.0 版）的当代（2016-2020 年）土地覆盖分类[数据集]。NERC EDS 英国极地数据中心。https://doi.org/10.5285/5A5EE38C-E296-48A2-85D2-E29DB66E5E24。