A Combined Deep Learning and Prior Knowledge Constraint Approach for Large-Scale Forest Disturbance Detection Using Time Series Remote Sensing Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The scale and severity of forest disturbances across the globe are increasing due to climate change and human activities. Remote sensing analysis using time series data is a powerful approach for detecting large-scale forest disturbances and describing detailed forest dynamics. Various large-scale forest disturbance detection algorithms have been proposed, but most of them are only suitable for detecting high-magnitude forest disturbances (e.g., fire, harvest). Conversely, more continuous, subtle, and gradual lower-magnitude forest disturbances (e.g., thinning, pests, and diseases) have been subject to less focus. Deep learning (DL) can distinguish subtle differences in information within time series data, offering new opportunities to capture forest disturbances in a complete and detailed way. This study proposes an approach for analyzing forest dynamics across large areas and long time periods by combining DL time series classification and prior knowledge constraint. The approach consists of two stages: (1) an improved self-attention model used for time series classification to identify sequences with forest disturbance characteristics; (2) developed skip-disturbance recovery index (S-DRI) characterizing the temporal context, using prior knowledge constraint to identify forest disturbance years in time series with disturbance characteristics. In this study, the year of forest disturbances in five study areas located in the United States, Canada, and Poland from 2001 to 2020 was mapped. A total of 3082 manually interpreted test data with different disturbance causal agents (such as fire, harvest, conversion, hurricane, and pests) were sampled from five research areas for validation. Our approach was also evaluated against two forest disturbance benchmark datasets derived from LandTrendr and the Global Forest Change (GFC) dataset. The results demonstrate that our approach achieved an overall accuracy of 87.8%, surpassing the accuracy of LandTrendr (84.6%) and the Global Forest Change dataset (81.4%). Furthermore, our approach demonstrated lower omission rates (ranging from 10.0% to 67.4%) in detecting subtle to severe causal agents of forest disturbance, in comparison to LandTrendr (with a range of 18.0% to 81.6%) and GFC (with a range of 15.0% to 88.8%). This study, which involved mapping large-scale and long-term forest disturbance in multiple regions, revealed that our approach can be applied to new areas without a requirement for complex parameter adjustments. These results demonstrate the potential of our approach in generating comprehensive and detailed forest disturbance data, thus providing a new and effective method in this domain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".