Driftwood plays a key role in Arctic coastal ecosystems: it stores carbon, stabilises coastlines and provides a habitat for animals.
Driftwood plays a key role in Arctic coastal ecosystems: it stores carbon, stabilises coastlines and provides a habitat for animals. At the same time, it can offer clues regarding climate change in the Arctic region, providing information on the likes of storm surges, coastal erosion and shifting fluvial dynamics. Despite the crucial role it plays, there is still a lot that we do not know about the large-scale distribution patterns of driftwood. Now, for the first time, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute have systematically mapped driftwood deposits along an 11,000 kilometre stretch of coastline in Alaska and North West Canada, using satellite imagery and AI-powered evaluation methods. The result is the largest database ever produced, with researchers able to identify over 19,000 stable driftwood deposits. The findings will soon be published in the Scientific Reports journal.
An astonishing amount of driftwood accumulates along Arctic coastlines, primarily composed of pine, fir and larch logs from forests. These logs travel down rivers into the ocean, where they ultimately end up deposited along the coastline, either as individual logs or dense blankets of wood. Covering areas of up to 15 hectares, some of the larger clusters are similar in size to 20 football pitches. “Our study provides the most comprehensive overview of driftwood distribution and accumulation patterns in the Arctic to date,” says Carl Stadie, the study’s lead author and PhD student in the Permafrost Research Section of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). To achieve this, the team gathered roughly 2.3 terabytes of satellite data between 2019 and 2023, which in total covered 1.3 million square kilometres of coastal areas of the North American Arctic. “We then used this data to train a neural network to automatically recognise driftwood in these images.”
Read More: Alfred Wegener Institute
Driftwood Accumulations along Arctic Coasts (Photo Credit: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / Carl Stadie)
