arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Annual Earth-observation embeddings encode wildfire disturbance and support simplified burned area mapping

Annual Earth‑observation embeddings, specifically Tessera, can encode wildfire disturbance signals well enough to map burned areas without needing curated fire‑specific imagery or dense time‑series analysis. In tests, linear models using a single Tessera embedding matched or outperformed paired pre‑ and post‑fire HLS imagery and post‑fire imagery alone, achieving high F1 scores for burn‑scar delineation and regional mapping. The approach successfully mapped all same‑year fires in benchmark scenes, recovered 97% of California burned area without California training data, transferred to European fires with high accuracy, and even estimated ignition timing within a 13‑day error margin. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that pre‑trained annual embeddings can simplify and scale burned‑area mapping, reducing reliance on dense time‑series data and enabling more efficient wildfire monitoring."

By Jovana Knezevic, Clement Atzberger, Zhengpeng Feng, Adam F. A. Pellegrini, Srinivasan Keshav, David Coomes
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Below-ground Fungal Biodiversity Can be Monitored Using Self-Supervised Learning Satellite Features

The study demonstrates that self‑supervised learning (SSL) applied to satellite imagery can predict below‑ground ectomycorrhizal fungal richness across diverse environments, explaining over half the variance in species richness from ~12,000 field samples in Europe and Asia. SSL‑derived features outperform traditional climate, soil, and land‑cover predictors and provide a 10,000‑fold increase in spatial resolution, moving from 1 km averages to 10 m habitat‑scale observations. The approach enables temporal monitoring of underground biodiversity and was applied to two UK National Park woodlands, highlighting ancient forests with high but declining ectomycorrhizal diversity for further field verification.

By Robin Young, Michael E. Van Nuland, E. Toby Kiers, Tom\'a\v{s} V\v{e}trovsk\'y, Petr Kohout, Petr Baldrian, Srinivasan Keshav