Beaver Impacts Tool: A Graphical User Interface for Analyzing Ecosystem Impacts of Beaver Dams Using Remote Sensing Data
Beavers are being increasingly recognized as driving factors in diverse and resilient riparian ecosystems. Many of their impacts, including changes to water levels and vegetation, can be studied through remote sensing. However, ecologists and conservationists may lack the tools to easily analyze remote sensing data for these purposes. We offer here a Google Earth Engine-backed Streamlit app that allows users to easily upload locations of observed dams or installed beaver dam analogs for analysis. Via a graphical user interface, users then generate a set of dam-absent locations for comparison and receive plots and numerical data indicating how indices associated with vegetation, water, temperature, and evapotranspiration change over time for dam-present and dam-absent locations. Based on the availability of open datasets, our tool provides coverage from 2017 onward. The cloud version of the tool can be accessed via a static URL, or users can run the app locally using code and documentation provided on github. We believe this tool will allow a wider range of ecologists and conservationists to complement their work with the use of remote sensing data, without the need to gain expertise in specific software.