Claire Robin

Vitus Benson, Claire Robin, Christian Requena-Mesa et al.

The innovative application of precise geospatial vegetation forecasting holds immense potential across diverse sectors, including agriculture, forestry, humanitarian aid, and carbon accounting. To leverage the vast availability of satellite imagery for this task, various works have applied deep neural networks for predicting multispectral images in photorealistic quality. However, the important area of vegetation dynamics has not been thoroughly explored. Our study breaks new ground by introducing GreenEarthNet, the first dataset specifically designed for high-resolution vegetation forecasting, and Contextformer, a novel deep learning approach for predicting vegetation greenness from Sentinel 2 satellite images with fine resolution across Europe. Our multi-modal transformer model Contextformer leverages spatial context through a vision backbone and predicts the temporal dynamics on local context patches incorporating meteorological time series in a parameter-efficient manner. The GreenEarthNet dataset features a learned cloud mask and an appropriate evaluation scheme for vegetation modeling. It also maintains compatibility with the existing satellite imagery forecasting dataset EarthNet2021, enabling cross-dataset model comparisons. Our extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that our methods outperform a broad range of baseline techniques. This includes surpassing previous state-of-the-art models on EarthNet2021, as well as adapted models from time series forecasting and video prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first models for continental-scale vegetation modeling at fine resolution able to capture anomalies beyond the seasonal cycle, thereby paving the way for predicting vegetation health and behaviour in response to climate variability and extremes.

Claire Robin, Christian Requena-Mesa, Vitus Benson et al.

Forecasting the state of vegetation in response to climate and weather events is a major challenge. Its implementation will prove crucial in predicting crop yield, forest damage, or more generally the impact on ecosystems services relevant for socio-economic functioning, which if absent can lead to humanitarian disasters. Vegetation status depends on weather and environmental conditions that modulate complex ecological processes taking place at several timescales. Interactions between vegetation and different environmental drivers express responses at instantaneous but also time-lagged effects, often showing an emerging spatial context at landscape and regional scales. We formulate the land surface forecasting task as a strongly guided video prediction task where the objective is to forecast the vegetation developing at very fine resolution using topography and weather variables to guide the prediction. We use a Convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) architecture to address this task and predict changes in the vegetation state in Africa using Sentinel-2 satellite NDVI, having ERA5 weather reanalysis, SMAP satellite measurements, and topography (DEM of SRTMv4.1) as variables to guide the prediction. Ours results highlight how ConvLSTM models can not only forecast the seasonal evolution of NDVI at high resolution, but also the differential impacts of weather anomalies over the baselines. The model is able to predict different vegetation types, even those with very high NDVI variability during target length, which is promising to support anticipatory actions in the context of drought-related disasters.

Gustau Camps-Valls, Miguel-Ángel Fernández-Torres, Kai-Hendrik Cohrs et al.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has deeply impacted various fields, including Earth system sciences. Here, AI improved weather forecasting, model emulation, parameter estimation, and the prediction of extreme events. However, the latter comes with specific challenges, such as developing accurate predictors from noisy, heterogeneous and limited annotated data. This paper reviews how AI is being used to analyze extreme events (like floods, droughts, wildfires and heatwaves), highlighting the importance of creating accurate, transparent, and reliable AI models. We discuss the hurdles of dealing with limited data, integrating information in real-time, deploying models, and making them understandable, all crucial for gaining the trust of stakeholders and meeting regulatory needs. We provide an overview of how AI can help identify and explain extreme events more effectively, improving disaster response and communication. We emphasize the need for collaboration across different fields to create AI solutions that are practical, understandable, and trustworthy for analyzing and predicting extreme events. Such collaborative efforts aim to enhance disaster readiness and disaster risk reduction.

Chaonan Ji, Tonio Fincke, Vitus Benson et al.

With climate extremes' rising frequency and intensity, robust analytical tools are crucial to predict their impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. Machine learning techniques show promise but require well-structured, high-quality, and curated analysis-ready datasets. Earth observation datasets comprehensively monitor ecosystem dynamics and responses to climatic extremes, yet the data complexity can challenge the effectiveness of machine learning models. Despite recent progress in deep learning to ecosystem monitoring, there is a need for datasets specifically designed to analyse compound heatwave and drought extreme impact. Here, we introduce the DeepExtremeCubes database, tailored to map around these extremes, focusing on persistent natural vegetation. It comprises over 40,000 spatially sampled small data cubes (i.e. minicubes) globally, with a spatial coverage of 2.5 by 2.5 km. Each minicube includes (i) Sentinel-2 L2A images, (ii) ERA5-Land variables and generated extreme event cube covering 2016 to 2022, and (iii) ancillary land cover and topography maps. The paper aims to (1) streamline data accessibility, structuring, pre-processing, and enhance scientific reproducibility, and (2) facilitate biosphere dynamics forecasting in response to compound extremes.