| Summary: | Riding through Canadian polar bear country in a Tundra Buggy - essentially a monster truck that keeps riders safely distanced from wildlife - a BYU engineering capstone team scoured the landscape with sharp eyes. When they finally spotted their first polar bear of the day, they ecstatically sent its GPS coordinates to the helicopter above. (The polar bear, enjoying a nap, remained unmoved by the sight of them.) Locating a bear in the vast terrain had been tough, but the students' real work would begin back at BYU, where they'd determine whether they could see that same polar bear again, this time in the radar images taken from the helicopter. Their goal was to discover if radar can feasibly track the bears aboveground. If so, the team's work would mark a significant step forward in scientists' ability to track mother polar bears during winter, when they den and give birth to their cubs beneath dense snowpack. Locating and protecting bear dens is important for conservation efforts. "Polar bears have become the symbol for climate change, and looking across the board, biologists have put together a chilling tale of the future of these bears," said BYU plant and wildlife sciences professor Tom Smith. Smith serves on the advisory board of the capstone team's sponsor, Polar Bears International, a group based in Churchill, Canada, that is committed to ensuring polar bears' survival in the Arctic. "We want to do something, anything, to try to stop that decline. The students bring the skills that we need to try out this new technology, synthetic aperture radar (SAR)." SAR offers an alternative to infrared, the current method used for identifying dens, which is often ineffective because the bears are so well insulated that their heat can't penetrate the snowpack. The theory behind SAR is that, with long wavelengths, radar will penetrate the snow and send back a "signature" of a polar bear - data that can be processed mathematically to reveal a picture of... |