Foundation Models for Environmental Science: A Survey of Emerging Frontiers
It addresses the problem of limited data and complexity in environmental science for researchers and practitioners, but is incremental as it surveys existing methods rather than introducing new ones.
This survey tackles the challenge of modeling complex environmental ecosystems by exploring the application of foundation models, which leverage large-scale pre-training to capture spatiotemporal dynamics and adapt to various environmental tasks such as prediction, data generation, and decision-making.
Modeling environmental ecosystems is essential for effective resource management, sustainable development, and understanding complex ecological processes. However, traditional data-driven methods face challenges in capturing inherently complex and interconnected processes and are further constrained by limited observational data in many environmental applications. Foundation models, which leverages large-scale pre-training and universal representations of complex and heterogeneous data, offer transformative opportunities for capturing spatiotemporal dynamics and dependencies in environmental processes, and facilitate adaptation to a broad range of applications. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of foundation model applications in environmental science, highlighting advancements in common environmental use cases including forward prediction, data generation, data assimilation, downscaling, inverse modeling, model ensembling, and decision-making across domains. We also detail the process of developing these models, covering data collection, architecture design, training, tuning, and evaluation. Through discussions on these emerging methods as well as their future opportunities, we aim to promote interdisciplinary collaboration that accelerates advancements in machine learning for driving scientific discovery in addressing critical environmental challenges.