Related papers: Unlocking tropical forest complexity: How tree ass…
Forests offer essential resources and services to humanity, yet preserving and restoring them presents challenges, particularly due to the limited availability of actionable data, especially in hard-to-reach areas like forest canopies.…
Identification of tree species plays a key role in forestry related tasks like forest conservation, disease diagnosis and plant production. There had been a debate regarding the part of the tree to be used for differentiation, whether it…
Explaining the emergence of self-organized biodiversity and species abundance distribution patterns remians a fundamental challenge in ecology. While classical frameworks, such as neutral theory and models based on pairwise species…
We develop a theoretical framework to understand the persistence and coexistence of competitive species in a spatially explicit metacommunity model with a heterogeneous dispersal kernel. Our analysis, based on methods from the physics of…
Time-varying covariates are often available in survival studies and estimation of the hazard function needs to be updated as new information becomes available. In this paper, we investigate several different easy-to-implement ways that…
Image segmentation is a crucial step in various visual applications, including environmental monitoring through remote sensing. In the context of the ForestEyes project, which combines citizen science and machine learning to detect…
Data analysis and machine learning have become an integrative part of the modern scientific methodology, offering automated procedures for the prediction of a phenomenon based on past observations, unraveling underlying patterns in data and…
We propose a new optimization-based approach for feature selection in tree ensembles, an important problem in statistics and machine learning. Popular tree ensemble toolkits e.g., Gradient Boosted Trees and Random Forests support feature…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
Climate change is an impending disaster which is of pressing concern more and more every year. Countless efforts have been made to study the long-term effects of climate change on agriculture, land resources, and biodiversity. Studies…
Large image collections generated from camera traps offer valuable insights into species richness, occupancy, and activity patterns, significantly aiding biodiversity monitoring. However, the manual processing of these datasets is…
Urban trees help regulate temperature, reduce energy consumption, improve urban air quality, reduce wind speeds, and mitigating the urban heat island effect. Urban trees also play a key role in climate change mitigation and global warming…
The Atlantic Forest in Brazil is a critical biodiversity hotspot, yet less than 12-15% of its original cover remains. Although monitoring forest restoration on a large scale is essential, traditional methods are limited by the…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
Tree-based algorithms such as random forests and gradient boosted trees continue to be among the most popular and powerful machine learning models used across multiple disciplines. The conventional wisdom of estimating the impact of a…
The endemic pine, Pinus canariensis, forms one of the main forest ecosystems in the Canary Islands. In this archipelago, pine forest is a mosaic of natural stands (remnants of past forest overexploitation) and artificial stands planted from…
A central goal in ecology is to understand how biodiversity is maintained. Previous theoretical works have employed the rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game as a toy model, demonstrating that population mobility is crucial in determining the…
Mixed-species growth models are needed as a synthesis of ecological knowledge and for guiding forest management. Individual-tree models have been commonly used, but the difficulties of reliably scaling from the individual to the stand level…
We propose novel applications of parallel coordinates plots and Sankey diagrams to represent the hierarchies of interacting covariate effects in random forests. Each visualisation summarises the frequencies of all of the paths through all…
Communities around the world are increasingly interested in nature-based solutions to mitigation of coastal risks like coastal forests, but it remains unclear how much protective benefits vegetation provides, particularly in the limit of…