Related papers: Unlocking tropical forest complexity: How tree ass…
Interpretable machine learning has emerged as central in leveraging artificial intelligence within high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where understanding the rationale behind model predictions is as critical as achieving high…
The ecological principle of limiting similarity dictates that species similar in resource requirements will compete, with the superior eventually excluding the inferior competitor from the community. The observation that nonetheless…
Tropical forests play an essential role in the planet's ecosystem, making the conservation of these biomes a worldwide priority. However, ongoing deforestation and degradation pose a significant threat to their existence, necessitating…
Reliable localization is crucial for navigation in forests, where GPS is often degraded and LiDAR measurements are repetitive, occluded, and structurally complex. These conditions weaken the assumptions of traditional urban-centric…
Healthy urban forests comprising of diverse trees and shrubs play a crucial role in mitigating climate change. They provide several key advantages such as providing shade for energy conservation, and intercepting rainfall to reduce flood…
Wildfires pose a significant global threat to ecosystems worldwide, with California experiencing recurring fires due to various factors, including climate, topographical features, vegetation patterns, and human activities. This study aims…
Disturbances to the climate system, both natural and anthropogenic, have far reaching impacts that are not always easy to identify or quantify using traditional climate science analyses or causal modeling techniques. In this paper, we…
Airborne discrete return light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds covering forested areas can be processed to segment individual trees and retrieve their morphological attributes. Segmenting individual trees in natural deciduous…
We present an evaluation of the performance of an automated classification of the Hipparcos periodic variable stars into 26 types. The sub-sample with the most reliable variability types available in the literature is used to train…
The rapid global loss of biodiversity, particularly among insects, represents an urgent ecological crisis. Current methods for insect species discovery are manual, slow, and severely constrained by taxonomic expertise, hindering timely…
A complex two-parameter model resembling the classical voter model is introduced to describe macroecological properties of tropical tree communities. Monte-Carlo type computer simulations are performed on the model, investigating species…
Trees are key components of the terrestrial biosphere, playing vital roles in ecosystem function, climate regulation, and the bioeconomy. However, large-scale monitoring of individual trees remains limited by inadequate modelling. Available…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
Tree ensemble methods such as random forests [Breiman, 2001] are very popular to handle high-dimensional tabular data sets, notably because of their good predictive accuracy. However, when machine learning is used for decision-making…
Natural and anthropogenic disturbances are impacting the health of forests worldwide. Monitoring forest disturbances at scale is important to inform conservation efforts. Here, we present a scalable approach for country-wide mapping of…
Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…
In this work we introduce Natural Segmentation and Matching (NSM), an algorithm for reliable localization, using laser, in both urban and natural environments. Current state-of-the-art global approaches do not generalize well to…
Ecological studies have now gone beyond measures of species turnover towards measures of phylogenetic and functional dissimilarity with a main objective: disentangling the processes that drive species distributions from local to broad…
Airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) point clouds over large forested areas can be processed to segment individual trees and subsequently extract tree-level information. Existing segmentation procedures typically detect more than 90% of…
Climate has been an important factor in shaping the distribution and incidence of dengue cases in tropical and subtropical countries. In Costa Rica, a tropical country with distinctive micro-climates, dengue has been endemic since its…