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.
Now that makes sense. Finally. Beaver ponds are dam important to water storage which is dam important in a changing climate. I’m glad somebody is finally paying attention to it.
Deep learning algorithms will be developed to identify and classify wetland areas and detect beaver ponds from the data available over multiple time periods throughout the basin. “Deep learning is a is a subset of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to learn complex and intricate patterns in large data sets” says Matt Lythe, Managing Director of Lynker Analytics. “We will use supervised learning to detect and classify beaver ponds and wetlands within the river basin with multiple machine learning models developed to account for landscape differences across the river basin” he goes on to say.
CNHP’s team of wetland ecologists will provide direct human-model training using local knowledge of these complexes and conduct a field survey in several areas to ground truth the system and measure accuracy. “Beaver ponds have a characteristic morphology and signature in multi-spectral imagery which lends itself to supervised learning” adds Dr. Sarah Marshall, Ecohydrologist at CNHP.
Well now it takes a pretty massive network of neural networks to MAKE beaver ponds too. So that makes sense.
Scheduled for completion in May 2022, this project aims to produce an evidence-based analysis of wetland coverage and beaver activity over the past decade and enable monitoring to be carried out long term as imagery and LiDAR data are acquired.
The work will give the Walton Family Foundation Environment Program, scientists, and policy officials a more detailed understanding of wetland extent across the basin and enable further investigation of changes in the environment due to climate and human impacts over time.
Well now it’s nice to see the Walton foundation putting money into ACTUAL beavers, not just hypothetical ones. I hope the beaver ponds they identify with their algorithm will be closed to trapping. It wouldn’t make sense to identify something as valuable and put all that money into tracking it and then kill it for sport, right?
