Back

An image is worth a thousand species: combining neural networks, citizen science, and remote sensing to map biodiversity

Gillespie, L.; Ruffley, M.; Exposito-Alonso, M.

2022-08-16 ecology
10.1101/2022.08.16.504150 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Anthropogenic habitat destruction and climate change are altering the composition of plant communities worldwide1,2. However, traditional species distribution models cannot detect rapid, local plant species changes due to their low spatial and temporal resolution3,4, and remote sensing models can only identify changes in coarse vegetation categories5,6. Here we combine open-access remote sensing imagery, citizen science observations, and deep learning to create a multi-species prediction model at high spatial and temporal resolution. We train a novel deep convolutional neural network using [~]half a million observations within California to simultaneously predict the presence of over 2,000 plant species at meter-level resolution. This model--deepbiosphere--accurately performs many key biodiversity monitoring tasks, from fine-mapping geographic distributions of individual species and communities, to detecting rapid plant community changes in space and time. Deepbiosphere shifts the paradigm for species distribution modeling, providing a roadmap for inexpensive, automatic, and scalable detection of anthropogenic impacts on species worldwide.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.