Predicting butterfly species presence from satellite imagery using soft contrastive regularisation

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Hauptverfasser: van der Plas, Thijs L, Law, Stephen, Pocock, Michael JO
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author van der Plas, Thijs L
Law, Stephen
Pocock, Michael JO
author_facet van der Plas, Thijs L
Law, Stephen
Pocock, Michael JO
contents The growing demand for scalable biodiversity monitoring methods has fuelled interest in remote sensing data, due to its widespread availability and extensive coverage. Traditionally, the application of remote sensing to biodiversity research has focused on mapping and monitoring habitats, but with increasing availability of large-scale citizen-science wildlife observation data, recent methods have started to explore predicting multi-species presence directly from satellite images. This paper presents a new data set for predicting butterfly species presence from satellite data in the United Kingdom. We experimentally optimise a Resnet-based model to predict multi-species presence from 4-band satellite images, and find that this model especially outperforms the mean rate baseline for locations with high species biodiversity. To improve performance, we develop a soft, supervised contrastive regularisation loss that is tailored to probabilistic labels (such as species-presence data), and demonstrate that this improves prediction accuracy. In summary, our new data set and contrastive regularisation method contribute to the open challenge of accurately predicting species biodiversity from remote sensing data, which is key for efficient biodiversity monitoring.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_09306
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Predicting butterfly species presence from satellite imagery using soft contrastive regularisation
van der Plas, Thijs L
Law, Stephen
Pocock, Michael JO
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
The growing demand for scalable biodiversity monitoring methods has fuelled interest in remote sensing data, due to its widespread availability and extensive coverage. Traditionally, the application of remote sensing to biodiversity research has focused on mapping and monitoring habitats, but with increasing availability of large-scale citizen-science wildlife observation data, recent methods have started to explore predicting multi-species presence directly from satellite images. This paper presents a new data set for predicting butterfly species presence from satellite data in the United Kingdom. We experimentally optimise a Resnet-based model to predict multi-species presence from 4-band satellite images, and find that this model especially outperforms the mean rate baseline for locations with high species biodiversity. To improve performance, we develop a soft, supervised contrastive regularisation loss that is tailored to probabilistic labels (such as species-presence data), and demonstrate that this improves prediction accuracy. In summary, our new data set and contrastive regularisation method contribute to the open challenge of accurately predicting species biodiversity from remote sensing data, which is key for efficient biodiversity monitoring.
title Predicting butterfly species presence from satellite imagery using soft contrastive regularisation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09306