High-resolution Arctic Built Infrastructure and Terrain Analysis Tool (HABITAT)

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 at 4p (est) | Virtual via Webex

Dr. Chandi Witharana, Assistant Professor at University of Connecticut in the Department of Natural Resources & the Environment

There is an urgent need for advanced monitoring tools to accurately map Arctic permafrost landforms and thaw-related disturbances, track their evolution over time, and assess their economic impacts on human-built infrastructure. Over the past two decades, the entire Arctic has been repeatedly imaged by sub-meter resolution Maxar satellite sensors, resulting in data repositories containing millions of images and growing into the petabyte scale. Despite this wealth of data, geospatial products derived from imagery at a pan-Arctic scale remain rare. The challenge of scaling automated analysis across millions of square kilometers of heterogeneous Arctic landscapes underscores the demand for high-throughput data science pipelines. To address this gap, we developed the High-resolution Arctic Built Infrastructure and Terrain Analysis Tool (HABITAT) – a novel image analysis pipeline that brings operational-scale GeoAI capabilities into Arctic science applications. We demonstrate HABITAT’s utility through multiple Maxar-based mapping efforts, such as ice-wedge polygons (IWPs), ice-wedge polygon capillary networks, retrogressive thaw slumps, and human-built infrastructure features. HABITAT is designed to run efficiently on heterogeneous high-performance computing systems. One of HABITAT’s key outcomes is the creation of the first pan-Arctic ice-wedge polygon dataset, comprising over one billion individual IWPs across the tundra domain.

Dr. Chandi Witharana is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at UConn’s College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR).  He is the Director of UConn’s Remote Sensing and Geospatial Data Analytics Online Graduate Certificate. Dr. Witharana is also an affiliated faculty of Eversource Energy Center and the Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences at UConn. He is a member of American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and the American Geophysical Union. Dr. Witharana is the Director of ConnecticutView at UConn. He earned a PhD in Remote Sensing and an MS in GIScience at the University of Connecticut, and a BSc in Geology at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Prior to joining the UConn faculty, he was a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the SUNY Stony Brook. Dr. Witharana was a Geospatial Analyst at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. He conducts interdisciplinary remote sensing research speaking to the transformational uses of earth observation technology in environmental, industrial, and humanitarian applications.