Emre Anakok

Emre Anakok, Pierre Barbillon, Colin Fontaine et al.

Citizen science monitoring programs can generate large amounts of valuable data, but are often affected by sampling bias. We focus on a citizen science initiative that records plant-pollinator interactions, with the goal of learning embeddings that summarize the observed interactions while accounting for such bias. In our approach, plant and pollinator species are embedded based on their probability of interaction. These embeddings are derived using an adaptation of variational graph autoencoders for bipartite graphs. To mitigate the influence of sampling bias, we incorporate the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to ensure independence from continuous variables related to the sampling process. This allows us to integrate a fairness perspective, commonly explored in the social sciences, into the analysis of ecological data. We validate our method through a simulation study replicating key aspects of the sampling process and demonstrate its applicability and effectiveness using the Spipoll dataset.

Emre Anakok, Pierre Barbillon, Colin Fontaine et al.

Pollinators play a crucial role for plant reproduction, either in natural ecosystem or in human-modified landscape. Global change drivers,including climate change or land use modifications, can alter the plant-pollinator interactions. To assess the potential influence of global change drivers on pollination, large-scale interactions, climate and land use data are required. While recent machine learning methods, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), allow the analysis of such datasets, interpreting their results can be challenging. We explore existing methods for interpreting GNNs in order to highlight the effects of various environmental covariates on pollination network connectivity. A large simulation study is performed to confirm whether these methods can detect the interactive effect between a covariate and a genus of plant on connectivity, and whether the application of debiasing techniques influences the estimation of these effects. An application on the Spipoll dataset, with and without accounting for sampling effects, highlights the potential impact of land use on network connectivity and shows that accounting for sampling effects partially alters the estimation of these effects.