In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion in the number of beaver dams in Alaska’s tundra region.
University of Alaska Fairbanks research professor Ken Tape and his colleagues reported that the number of beaver ponds near the town of Kotzebue rose from two in 2002 to 98 in 2019, according to Smithsonian magazine. A nearby peninsula saw the number of beaver dams grow from 94 to 409 between 2010 and 2019.
Why? That’s a question Tape hopes to more definitively answer with the help of robots that will be developed by Brittany Duncan, Justin Bradley and other University of Nebraska-Lincoln faculty members through UNL’s Nebraska Intelligent MoBile Unmanned Systems Lab (NIMBUS). The researchers hope to find those answers over a period of three years thanks to a nearly $1.2 million grant recently awarded by the National Science Foundation.
For now, the working hypotheses are that a warming tundra is making the climate more hospitable to the rodents and that the beaver population is recovering after a couple of centuries of over-trapping.
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The researchers are hoping to get a sense of how beavers live and change the landscape. Those landscape changes include beavers dividing up a single water stream into several channels.
“There are other animals moving into the Arctic tundra. But they’re not changing the landscape like beavers,†Tape said. “Beavers are going in there and really changing the nature of these tundra streams, rivers, lake outlets — things like that. That’s why this question of beaver engineering is of great interest.â€
Through their ponds, beavers are accelerating the melting of permafrost, Tape said. That’s accelerating the pace of climate change.
“In the absence of beavers, the Arctic is a fairly stable place. It doesn’t change rapidly,†he said. “But when a beaver gets in there, it’s like hitting the system over the head with a hammer. All of the sudden, it looks different every year.â€
The UNL research team, which is led by Duncan, a computing associate professor, and includes fellow associate professors Bradley and Carrick Detweiler, will design drones and boats capable of navigating Alaska’s difficult terrain.
The drones will drop off the boats that are roughly the size of a suitcase. The boats, in turn, will skim the waters in and around the beaver ponds and deploy underwater sensors that can take water measurements and photos of beavers in their environments.
“Probably the most difficult challenge is seeing what’s going on underneath the ice in the winter,†Tape said.
Bradley said the robots will be able to communicate with each other and have the ability to autonomously make decisions up to an hour or so in advance, based on the conditions they encounter. Some of the theoretical decisions that Bradley outlined pertain to when the robots should talk to each other, where to fly and what to look for.
Duncan said the UNL researchers will head to Fairbanks this summer to test some early prototypes. Only then, Duncan said, will the researchers know just exactly what needs to be done.
“Until we get up there, we don’t have the sense of the kind of conditions that Ken has described to us on the ground,†Duncan said. “Next year, we’ll hope to have a more robust system and a more complete system that we’re going to take with us.â€
In the project’s third and final year, Duncan said the researchers will go to Nome, Alaska, near the Arctic Circle.
Duncan said the project seeing how beavers impact the Arctic climate will give researchers “a new, rich environment†to see how robots can be utilized for scientific purposes.
Additionally, NIMBUS received a three-year, $990,697 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture to unlock the potential of carbon sequestration in Nebraska by using drones to collect carbon samples in untilled agriculture lands. Bradley will lead that team, which also includes Detweiler and professors Trenton Franz and Francisco Muñoz-Arriola.
The goal, Bradley said, would be to help companies minimize the amount of in-person field work to collect carbon samples, thereby saving time and money. Drones could also identify the best spots to collect data to analyze the impact of carbon sequestration, which prevents carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere.
“My hope is … this will encourage landowners to engage in carbon sequestration because they know there will be less invasive techniques to do the verification,†Bradley said.