Canada
This presentation provides an overview of a collaborative project delivered by Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute aimed at piloting and refining state-of-the-art wetland mapping methodologies specific to Alberta’s boreal, parkland, and grassland zones. In 2020, the Government of Alberta published standards for addressing wetland inventory updates across the province, including requirements for minimum mapping unit, classification accuracy, and classification detail. Recent advancements in remote sensing methods and Earth observation data present encouraging avenues for meeting these standards. In response to this, the project team developed, advanced, and evaluated several methodologies across four pilot areas targeted at achieving the provincial benchmarks. These methodologies leveraged multiple AI technologies (e.g., machine and deep learning), Earth observation datasets, recent airborne lidar acquisitions, and airborne and field verified wetland surveys. The resulting inventories met the provincial mapping standards at various thematic levels, ranging from general wetland detection to wetland class and form details. The experimental results also underscore notable differences between AI approaches—in terms of training and validation data needs, as well as computational complexities and demands. These pilots have important implications for scaling these methods to a provincial level, and provide valuable insights for enhancing wetland mapping and monitoring across Alberta.
Presenter: Dr. Michael Merchant is a Senior Earth Observation Data Scientist in the ABMI’s Geospatial Centre and EO Insights Unit.