I-GUIDE VCO: Engineers from Space: A GeoAI Approach to Mapping Beaver Wetlands

Engineers from Space: A GeoAI Approach to Mapping Beaver Wetlands

August 26, 2026 11:00 am (Central Time)


Recorded VCO


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

Faezeh Maghsoodifar

University of Alabama

Fangchao Dong

University of Texas at Dallas

Parsa Keshavarzalamdari

California State University, Northridge

Raj Bhattarai

Virginia Tech University

Sara Grisales

Temple University

Eric Shook (Team Lead)

University of Minnesota

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