The Permafrost Discovery Gateway (PDG) invites you to join our monthly webinar series on
Thursday, May 29, 2025 at 9:00 AM AKT.
This series focuses on using big geospatial data and remote sensing for community planning applications across permafrost regions.
📅 May 29, 2025
Title: Map the Gap: Detecting and Characterizing Pan-Arctic Infrastructure with Satellite Imagery and AI
Speakers: Elias Manos & Chandi Witharana, University of Connecticut
📝 Abstract
Permafrost thaw threatens to disrupt the lives of millions of people living in the Arctic by damaging homes, roads, and various other critical buildings and structures needed to sustain over 1,000 Arctic communities. Impacts are already unfolding across the region. However, there is a lack of unified, high-resolution infrastructure data that is comprehensive in both geographic coverage and attribute information across the pan-Arctic.
This data is crucial to accurately estimate economic losses due to permafrost thaw damages—needed at international levels for disaster risk reduction tracking, and at local to regional scales for hazard mitigation planning and resource acquisition.
Using artificial intelligence models trained on geospatial data, this research bridges the data gap by:
- Detecting infrastructure such as buildings and roads from Maxar satellite imagery
- Predicting attributes of buildings, such as use type (e.g., residential vs. non-residential)
Findings demonstrate how this work has improved geographic gaps in the best available pan-Arctic building dataset (OpenStreetMap) and has the potential to fill in its largely missing building attribute information.