Chesapeake Conservancy data scientists taught a new AI tool to map wetlands more accurately

Chesapeake Conservancy is datafying the country’s dirt.The soppy nature of these geographical terrains has always proved tricky to map for organizations like the Chesapeake Conservancy.Much of the Chesapeake Conservancy data team’s work was funded by EPRI, or Electric Power Research Institute.“Being the Chesapeake Conservancy, we do a lot of work with the Chesapeake Bay Program, and the Bay Program has a goal to restore our lost wetlands across our region,” she said.

Thus, the Chesapeake Conservancy team and their colleagues at organizations that support the work believe that this AI model is only going to get more accurate and become more powerful with every project: “Ultimately,” the researcher said, “we think it could be using the model to map wetlands nationally.“The institute has had big challenges around wetlands whenever they have new infrastructure projects, since there’s a lot of infrastructure growth in cities, including solar development and renewable energy projects,” Minnemeyer said.