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Main Authors: Khan, Jowaria, Friedman, Alexa, Evans, Sydney, Klein, Rachel, Wang, Runzi, Manz, Katherine E., Beins, Kaley, Andrews, David Q., Bondi-Kelly, Elizabeth
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14894
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author Khan, Jowaria
Friedman, Alexa
Evans, Sydney
Klein, Rachel
Wang, Runzi
Manz, Katherine E.
Beins, Kaley
Andrews, David Q.
Bondi-Kelly, Elizabeth
author_facet Khan, Jowaria
Friedman, Alexa
Evans, Sydney
Klein, Rachel
Wang, Runzi
Manz, Katherine E.
Beins, Kaley
Andrews, David Q.
Bondi-Kelly, Elizabeth
contents Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent environmental contaminants with significant public health impacts, yet large-scale monitoring remains severely limited due to the high cost and logistical challenges of field sampling. The lack of samples leads to difficulty simulating their spread with physical models and limited scientific understanding of PFAS transport in surface waters. Yet, rich geospatial and satellite-derived data describing land cover, hydrology, and industrial activity are widely available. We introduce FOCUS, a geospatial deep learning framework for PFAS contamination mapping that integrates sparse PFAS observations with large-scale environmental context, including priors derived from hydrological connectivity, land cover, source proximity, and sampling distance. These priors are integrated into a principled, noise-aware loss, yielding a robust training objective under sparse labels. Across extensive ablations, robustness analyses, and real-world validation, FOCUS consistently outperforms baselines including sparse segmentation, Kriging, and pollutant transport simulations, while preserving spatial coherence and scalability over large regions. Our results demonstrate how AI can support environmental science by providing screening-level risk maps that prioritize follow-up sampling and help connect potential sources to surface-water contamination patterns in the absence of complete physical models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_14894
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FOCUS on Contamination: Hydrology-Informed Noise-Aware Learning for Geospatial PFAS Mapping
Khan, Jowaria
Friedman, Alexa
Evans, Sydney
Klein, Rachel
Wang, Runzi
Manz, Katherine E.
Beins, Kaley
Andrews, David Q.
Bondi-Kelly, Elizabeth
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
I.2.1; I.2.10; I.4.6; I.4.9; I.4.10; J.2
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent environmental contaminants with significant public health impacts, yet large-scale monitoring remains severely limited due to the high cost and logistical challenges of field sampling. The lack of samples leads to difficulty simulating their spread with physical models and limited scientific understanding of PFAS transport in surface waters. Yet, rich geospatial and satellite-derived data describing land cover, hydrology, and industrial activity are widely available. We introduce FOCUS, a geospatial deep learning framework for PFAS contamination mapping that integrates sparse PFAS observations with large-scale environmental context, including priors derived from hydrological connectivity, land cover, source proximity, and sampling distance. These priors are integrated into a principled, noise-aware loss, yielding a robust training objective under sparse labels. Across extensive ablations, robustness analyses, and real-world validation, FOCUS consistently outperforms baselines including sparse segmentation, Kriging, and pollutant transport simulations, while preserving spatial coherence and scalability over large regions. Our results demonstrate how AI can support environmental science by providing screening-level risk maps that prioritize follow-up sampling and help connect potential sources to surface-water contamination patterns in the absence of complete physical models.
title FOCUS on Contamination: Hydrology-Informed Noise-Aware Learning for Geospatial PFAS Mapping
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
I.2.1; I.2.10; I.4.6; I.4.9; I.4.10; J.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14894