Remote Sensing Transfer Learning for Species Distribution Modeling

Species distribution models link species observations to environmental variables. Current methods for collecting environmental variables generally consist of field-based methods or basic summary statistics of remotely sensed data. As the spatial extent of models expand to map continental and global patterns, field-based methods are no longer be feasible. While remotely sensed data offer a powerful alternative to physically collected features, summary statistics are rudimentary when compared to state-of-the-art computer vision techniques. We propose to replace coarse summaries with deep features extracted from high-resolution aerial images to better characterize habitats. We use a transfer learning approach to tune a Convolutional Neural Network to learn features relevant to species distribution modeling. We evaluate our approach using the citizen science based eBird dataset.

Major Advisor: Rebecca Hutchinson
Committee: Fuxin Li
Committee: Alan Fern