GeoLifeCLEF 2023

Motivation

Predicting which species are present in a given area through species distribution modeling is a central problem in ecology and a crucial issue for biodiversity conservation. Such predictions are a fundamental element of many decision-making processes, whether for land use planning, the definition of protected areas or the implementation of more ecological agricultural practices. The models classically used in ecology are well-established but have the drawback of covering only a limited number of species at spatial resolutions often coarse in the order of kilometers or hundreds of meters at best. The objective of GeoLifeCLEF is to evaluate models with orders of magnitude hitherto unseen, whether in terms of the number of species covered (thousands), spatial resolution (on the order of 10 meters), or the number of occurrences used as training data (several million). These models have the potential to greatly improve biodiversity management processes, especially at the local level (e.g. municipalities), where the need for spatial and taxonomic precision is greatest.

Data collection

A brand new dataset was built for the 2023 edition of GeoLifeCLEF in collaboration with two European projects related to biodiversity monitoring (MAMBO and GUARDEN). It contains about 5 million species occurrences extracted from various selected datasets of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and covering the whole EU territory (38 countries including E.U. members). For the explanatory variables, each occurrence is associated with rich multimodal data including both high resolution remote sensing images and time series (i.e., Sentinel-2 RGB, Near-IR, Red-Edge and SWIR, along with altitude) and coarser resolution environmental raster data (e.g., Chelsa climate, SoilGrids, land use, etc.).

Task description

Given a test set of locations (i.e., geo-coordinates) and corresponding high-resolution remote sensing images and environmental covariates, the goal of the task will be to return for each location the set of species that were inventoried at that location. The test set includes only locations for which an exhaustive plant species inventory is available (i.e., in the form or presence/absence data).

How to participate ?

1. Subscribe to CLEF (GeoLifeCLEF task) by filling this form
2. Go to the Kaggle's GeoLifeCLEF 2023 challenge page: Kaggle challenge

Credit

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation program under grant agreement No 101060639 (MAMBO project) and No 101060693 (GUARDEN project).