Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Groundwater recharge is a key hydrogeological variable that informs the renewability of groundwater resources. Long-term average (LTA) groundwater recharge provides a measure of replenishment under the prevailing climatic and landuse conditions and is therefore of considerable interest in assessing the sustainability of groundwater withdrawals globally. This study builds on the modelling results of MacDonald et al. (2021) who produced the first LTA groundwater recharge map across Africa using a linear mixed model (LMM) rooted in 134 ground-based studies. Here, continent-wide predictions of groundwater recharge were generated using Random Forest (RF) regression employing five variables (precipitation, potential evapotranspiration, soil moisture, NDVI and aridity index) at a higher spatial resolution (0.1° resolution) to explore whether an improved model might be achieved through machine learning. Through the development of a series of RF models, we confirm that a RF model is able to generate maps of higher spatial variability than LMM; the performance of final RF models in terms of the goodness of fit (R2 = 0.83, 0.88 with residual kriging) is comparable to the LMM (R2 = 0.86). The higher spatial scale of the predictor data (0.1°) in RF models better preserves small-scale variability from predictor data, than the values provided via interpolated LMM; these may provide useful in testing global-to-local scale models. The RF model remains, nevertheless, constrained by its representation of focused recharge and by the limited range of recharge studies in tropical Africa, especially in the areas of high precipitation. This confers substantial uncertainty in model estimates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.026 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.145 | 0.115 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".