From Images to Insights: Explainable Biodiversity Monitoring with Plain Language Habitat Explanations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhou, Yutong, Ryo, Masahiro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhou, Yutong
Ryo, Masahiro
author_facet Zhou, Yutong
Ryo, Masahiro
contents Explaining why the species lives at a particular location is important for understanding ecological systems and conserving biodiversity. However, existing ecological workflows are fragmented and often inaccessible to non-specialists. We propose an end-to-end visual-to-causal framework that transforms a species image into interpretable causal insights about its habitat preference. The system integrates species recognition, global occurrence retrieval, pseudo-absence sampling, and climate data extraction. We then discover causal structures among environmental features and estimate their influence on species occurrence using modern causal inference methods. Finally, we generate statistically grounded, human-readable causal explanations from structured templates and large language models. We demonstrate the framework on a bee and a flower species and report early results as part of an ongoing project, showing the potential of the multimodal AI assistant backed up by a recommended ecological modeling practice for describing species habitat in human-understandable language. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Yutong-Zhou-cv/BioX.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10559
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Images to Insights: Explainable Biodiversity Monitoring with Plain Language Habitat Explanations
Zhou, Yutong
Ryo, Masahiro
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Explaining why the species lives at a particular location is important for understanding ecological systems and conserving biodiversity. However, existing ecological workflows are fragmented and often inaccessible to non-specialists. We propose an end-to-end visual-to-causal framework that transforms a species image into interpretable causal insights about its habitat preference. The system integrates species recognition, global occurrence retrieval, pseudo-absence sampling, and climate data extraction. We then discover causal structures among environmental features and estimate their influence on species occurrence using modern causal inference methods. Finally, we generate statistically grounded, human-readable causal explanations from structured templates and large language models. We demonstrate the framework on a bee and a flower species and report early results as part of an ongoing project, showing the potential of the multimodal AI assistant backed up by a recommended ecological modeling practice for describing species habitat in human-understandable language. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Yutong-Zhou-cv/BioX.
title From Images to Insights: Explainable Biodiversity Monitoring with Plain Language Habitat Explanations
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10559