I woke up this morning to see that Kylie sold her annoying HCN beavers ruining the artic article to the atlantic. Well, bully for her. They took out most of the trapping stuff and left in the nice paragraph about biodiversity. Good. But we need to talk about something else this morning.

Lynker Partnership Tracks Wetland & Beaver Pond Changes Using Cutting Edge Technology

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) tracks the status and trends of wetlands across the United States. The National Wetlands Inventory (NWI), maintained by USFWS, is a nation-wide map of wetlands that has been created over several decades by multiple different mapping partners. The dataset is incredibly valuable, but does not track changes over time and the age of the data is variable across the West.

This is the first project of its kind, wherein the research team will use state-of-the-art remote sensing and machine learning techniques to map the extent of wetlands as well as the presence of beaver ponds and their changes over time. The mapping and analysis will be carried out using high resolution 4-band aerial photography from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) and LiDAR acquired by the government between 2006 and 2021. (more…)