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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2026-581</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>A Sentinel-2 semantic segmentation dataset for thermokarst-associated lake and pond water surfaces in Arctic permafrost lowlands</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Ze</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7330-031X</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Guo</surname>
<given-names>Ziyou</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yan</surname>
<given-names>Qingkai</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhai</surname>
<given-names>Jinbang</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Gagarin</surname>
<given-names>Leonid</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5354-084X</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Torgovkin</surname>
<given-names>Nikolai</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Andrei</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>College of Civil Engineering and Transportation; China-Russia International Joint Key Laboratory of Heilongjiang Province for Permafrost Science and Technology (International Cooperation), Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Melnikov Permafrost Institute, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, 36 Merzlotnaya Street, Yakutsk 677010, Russia</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>These authors contributed equally to this work.</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>28</day>
<month>10</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>33</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Ze Zhang et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-581/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-581/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-581/essd-2026-581.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-581/essd-2026-581.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Lake and pond water surfaces in thermokarst-affected Arctic permafrost lowlands are important for hydrological, habitat, and carbon-cycle studies. Existing inland-water products rarely provide georeferenced image-mask pairs designed for supervised segmentation of small Arctic water bodies. We present a Sentinel-2 semantic segmentation dataset for thermokarst-associated lake and pond water surfaces across 23 selected permafrost-lowland areas of interest (AOIs) spanning Alaska, northwestern Canada, European Russia, Yamal, and Siberia. The supervised target is visible summer lake and pond water, while separate tile-level fields record thermokarst relevance and non-target-water risk. The dataset contains 5513 image-mask pairs derived from summer 2023 Sentinel-2 Level-2A surface-reflectance composites. Each image is a 256 by 256 pixel GeoTIFF with five bands (B2, B3, B4, B8, and B11), accompanied by a binary water mask and a quality-assurance (QA) mask for invalid observations and ambiguous margins. The train, validation, and test splits contain 3982, 739, and 792 tiles, respectively. The masks contain 29,141,595 positive pixels, representing 8.07 % of all pixels and a pixel-count-equivalent area of approximately 2914.2 km&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;; 88.35 % of target-water pixels lie north of or on the Arctic Circle at 66&amp;deg;34&amp;prime; N. The package includes 16539 image, water-mask and QA GeoTIFF files, with sample metadata, source records, processing settings, split definitions and a 150-tile low-water subset index. A geometry audit identified cross-split overlap in the legacy development split and in the original Mackenzie Delta holdout. After removing overlapping and nearby development samples and retraining with QA-aware loss, the Mackenzie Delta experiment reached a target-agreement intersection-over-union (IoU) of 0.659 (spatial-cluster bootstrap interval 0.587&amp;ndash;0.728). The Yamal and European Russia holdout had no detected test&amp;ndash;development footprint overlap and retained its previously reported target-agreement IoU of 0.936. These values measure agreement with the released supervision targets; independent human-reference accuracy remains to be established. The release is designed for supervised segmentation and controlled model comparison within the represented 2023 Arctic permafrost-lowland settings. The dataset is available from the National Cryosphere Desert Data Center at &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.12072/ncdc.permafrost.db7645.2026&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;noopener&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.12072/ncdc.permafrost.db7645.2026&lt;/a&gt; (Guo, 2026). The accompanying model-output dataset is available on Zenodo at &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22965055&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;noopener&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22965055&lt;/a&gt; (Zhang et al., 2026).</p>
</abstract>
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<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Key Research and Development Program of China</funding-source>
<award-id>2025YFE0112500</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs2">
<funding-source>Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation</funding-source>
<award-id>126020616798-4</award-id>
<award-id>126020516709-1</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
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