Bird Distribution Modelling using Remote Sensing and Citizen Science data

Abstract

Climate change is a major driver of biodiversity loss, changing the geographic range and abundance of many species. However, there remain significant knowledge gaps about the distribution of species, due principally to the amount of effort and expertise required for traditional field monitoring. We propose an approach leveraging computer vision to improve species distribution modelling, combining the wide availability of remote sensing data with sparse on-ground citizen science data. We introduce a novel task and dataset for mapping US bird species to their habitats by predicting species encounter rates from satellite images, along with baseline models which demonstrate the power of our approach. Our methods open up possibilities for scalably modelling ecosystems properties worldwide.