Using unmanned aerial vehicles and artificial intelligence to quantify ant impact on the Arctic ecosystem carbon dynamics

A warming climate is rapidly changing Arctic ecosystems and risks to release large amounts of soil organic carbon (C).

In most biomes, soil organic C is to a large extent controlled by detritivores and termites, and ants (Formicidae) are among the most important ecosystem engineers.

Ants are limited in their latitudinal range by cold temperatures in Arctic ecosystems, but will spread in response to a warmer climate.

The implications for C dynamics in Arctic ecosystems remain unstudied, despite knowledge that ants alter soil conditions, drive C and nitrogen (N) mineralization, alter CO2 fluxes, and strongly impact vegetation communities.

Our preliminary studies show that unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery can quantify ant mounds and reveal increased ecosystem productivity in proximity of ant mounds.

This project aims to quantify the impact of ants on soils and vegetation in the Arctic and to understand the relevance of this process for C dynamics in a warming climate by:(1) Quantifying the effect of ants on ecosystem C stocks and fluxes in Arctic landscapes.(2) Model spatial ant distribution using a novel multispectral UAV approach aided by artificial intelligence object-detection and machine-learning.(3) Combining this information with machine-learning driven digital soil mapping to scale the impact to landscape, regional and Arctic scale, and connect it to IPCC warming scenarios.(4) Communicate the results to a diverse group of stakeholders.