Engineers from Space: A GeoAI Approach to Mapping Beaver Wetlands
August 26, 2026 11:00 am (Central Time)
Abstract
Beavers are nature’s ecosystem engineers, and their impacts on the landscape through building dams and creating wetlands can be observed using remote sensing and satellite imagery. During this Summer School 2026 project, Team 4 developed computational workflows that use geospatial analytics and geoAI models to map beaver dams. They used existing human-created training data and explored multiple approaches to develop a scalable, automated workflow for future research projects. They explored both geoAI and traditional geospatial analytics as workflow components, comparing the advantages, disadvantages, and trade-offs of different approaches and models across evaluation criteria, including computational performance and accuracy. The design, development, and deployment of the workflow, analytics, and models will likely be applicable to other geospatial problems that use similar remotely sensed data (e.g., situations addressing many types of social and environmental problems).
Speakers
Summer School Team 4