Using unmanned aerial vehicles and artificial intelligence to quantify the impact of ants on the Arctic soil carbon

A warming climate is rapidly changing Arctic ecosystems and risks to release large amounts of soil organic carbon stored in Arctic soils.

In most biomes, soil organic carbon 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 are likely to spread in response to a warmer climate.

The implications for carbon dynamics in Arctic ecosystems remain largely unstudied, despite knowledge that ants alter soil conditions, drive C and N mineralization, and strongly impact vegetation communities.

My preliminary studies show that unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery can be used to quantify ant mounds and reveals higher 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 carbon stocks and dynamics in a warming climate by:(1) Quantifying the effect of ants on ecosystem carbon (soil organic carbon stocks and CO2 fluxes) in Arctic landscapes.(2) Determine factors controlling ant distribution using a novel multispectral UAV approach aided by artificial intelligence object-detection.(3) Combining this information with machine-learning driven species distribution modeling and digital soil mapping to scale the impact to landscape, regional and Arctic scale and connect it to IPCC warming scenarios.