Can artificial intelligence improve maps for land conservation?

SEATTLE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In December 2016, environmental group Chesapeake Conservancy unveiled one of the largest, high-resolution land-cover maps made in the United States. The bay, North America's biggest estuary, has struggled to recover from overfishing and pollution, and the conservancy hopes the map will guide environmental restoration decisions like where to plant stormwater-absorbing trees. Creating a 100,000-square-mile (259,000 square kilometres) digital map that defined land use - water, vegetation or concrete - at such a fine scale was "gruelling", said project director Jeff Allenby. "(It was) day after day of having staff process and correct the tiles," he said. First a computer analysed almost 80,000 tiles - each of which corresponds to about 13 square miles and digitally records the landscape.