Mapping biodiversity at very-high resolution in Europe
This provides fine-grained ecological insights for biodiversity conservation and management in Europe, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of high-resolution biodiversity mapping across Europe by developing a cascading multimodal pipeline that integrates species distribution modeling, biodiversity indicators, and habitat classification, resulting in continental-scale maps at 50x50m resolution.
This paper describes a cascading multimodal pipeline for high-resolution biodiversity mapping across Europe, integrating species distribution modeling, biodiversity indicators, and habitat classification. The proposed pipeline first predicts species compositions using a deep-SDM, a multimodal model trained on remote sensing, climate time series, and species occurrence data at 50x50m resolution. These predictions are then used to generate biodiversity indicator maps and classify habitats with Pl@ntBERT, a transformer-based LLM designed for species-to-habitat mapping. With this approach, continental-scale species distribution maps, biodiversity indicator maps, and habitat maps are produced, providing fine-grained ecological insights. Unlike traditional methods, this framework enables joint modeling of interspecies dependencies, bias-aware training with heterogeneous presence-absence data, and large-scale inference from multi-source remote sensing inputs.