The Riparian Area Assessment of the Upper, Mid and Lower Pembina River Watersheds project focused on assessing riparian habitat along lake, creek, stream and river shorelines. This dataset was created for the Athabasca Watershed Council as a part of a large scale riparian area assessment in Alberta. The overall goal of this project was to quantify and characterize the intactness of riparian management areas in the Pembina River watersheds, and to further assess pressure on riparian system function by evaluating land use and land cover within local catchments immediately adjacent to the waterbodies included in this study.

The Riparian Area Assessment of Red Deer River watershed includes the Buffalo, Kneehills, Little Red Deer and Threehills subwatershed. This project focused on assessing riparian habitat along lake, creek, stream and river shorelines. This dataset was created for the Red Deer River Watershed Alliance as a part of a large scale riparian area assessment in Alberta. The overall goal of this project was to quantify and characterize the intactness of riparian management areas in the Red Deer River watershed. Riparian habitat was assessed along approximately 5,285 km of shoreline within the Buffalo, Kneehills, Little Red Deer, and Threehills subwatersheds. These four subwatersheds cover an area of ~11,754 km2 and are located in central Alberta, roughly between Ponoka and Airdrie.

The Riparian Areas Assessment of the Swan River Watershed focused on assessing riparian habitat along creek, stream and river shorelines. This dataset was created for the Lesser Slave Water Council as a part of a large scale riparian area assessment in Alberta. The overall goal of this project was to quantify and characterize the riparian habitat management in the Lesser Slave Lake watershed by assessing riparian areas along approximately 582 km of shoreline. The riparian areas that were assessed were located within the Swan River watershed (HUC 8) and included the left and right banks of the Swan, Moosehorn and Inverness Rivers. This study created a recent land cover layer within 50 m of selected shorelines and use this layer to assess the intactness of riparian areas along major waterbodies. It also provided guidance on how the results from the intactness assessments can be used to target conservation and restoration efforts within along the shorelines that were assessed as part of the study.

The Riparian Area Assessment of the North Saskatchewan and Battle River Watersheds project focused on assessing riparian habitat along lake, creek, stream and river shorelines. The majority of the shorelines of interest were located within the NSR or Battle River watersheds. however, an additional shoreline was also assessed within municipalities that partially intersect, but are not completely contained within, either the NSR or Battle River watersheds. In addition to assessing new shorelines, an important component of this project was compiling data for shorelines that had been previously assessed in central Alberta using the same assessment methodology. these data were combined together to create a single, seamless riparian assessment dataset that contains ~35,400 km of lake, river, stream, and creek shoreline. This dataset was created for the North Saskatchewan and Battle River Watershed Planning and Advisory Councils, as a part of a large scale Riparian Area Assessment in Alberta.

This 5 class 6 m resolution land cover was created for the NSWA and BRWA in 2020-2021 using SPOT6/7 imagery from 2017 and 2018 provided by the Government of Alberta in order to assess riparian intactness for 25,272 km of shoreline in Alberta. The land cover was developed from 44 separate supervised random forest classifications of 41 different SPOT6 6m imagery tiles from 2017/2018 and was then clipped to a 50 m buffer around waterbodies of interest. The full classification is composed of 41 individual polygon files, each of which corresponds to the original SPOT tile that the classification was performed on. Details on the individual SPOT tiles is available in the accompanying report. Two data products are available from this project: Wall to Wall Land Cover (available in TIFF and FGDB formats) and Shoreline Buffer (available in TIFF format). Please see the Distribution Information to obtain the data products.