EUNIS Habitat Maps: Enhancing Thematic and Spatial Resolution for Europe through Machine Learning
This work addresses the need for high-resolution habitat maps to support European nature conservation policies and restoration efforts, representing an incremental application of existing methods to new data.
The researchers tackled the problem of providing detailed and accurate habitat information for Europe by producing spatial predictions for 260 EUNIS habitat types at 100-m resolution using ensemble machine learning models, achieving strong predictive performances in validation datasets.
The EUNIS habitat classification is crucial for categorising European habitats, supporting European policy on nature conservation and implementing the Nature Restoration Law. To meet the growing demand for detailed and accurate habitat information, we provide spatial predictions for 260 EUNIS habitat types at hierarchical level 3, together with independent validation and uncertainty analyses. Using ensemble machine learning models, together with high-resolution satellite imagery and ecologically meaningful climatic, topographic and edaphic variables, we produced a European habitat map indicating the most probable EUNIS habitat at 100-m resolution across Europe. Additionally, we provide information on prediction uncertainty and the most probable habitats at level 3 within each EUNIS level 1 formation. This product is particularly useful for both conservation and restoration purposes. Predictions were cross-validated at European scale using a spatial block cross-validation and evaluated against independent data from France (forests only), the Netherlands and Austria. The habitat maps obtained strong predictive performances on the validation datasets with distinct trade-offs in terms of recall and precision across habitat formations.