Mapping Shrub and Tree Encroachment in Canadian Prairies Using Stacking Ensemble and Sentinel-1/2 Imagery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Woody plant encroachment (WPE) threatens grassland ecosystems across the Canadian Prairies, causing grassland biodiversity loss with substantial economic impacts due to reduced forage production. While remote sensing offers scalable monitoring capabilities, existing approaches lack frameworks for distinguishing shrub and tree encroachment and often require extensive ground truth data. This study developed an ensemble machine learning framework integrating Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical imagery with UAV-derived training data to map fractional shrub and tree cover across Saskatchewan's Aspen Parkland and Moist Mixed Grassland ecoregions, SK. A stacking ensemble combining Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, XGBoost, and Artificial Neural Network models with Ridge regression meta-learning outperformed individual algorithms, achieving mean R2 values of 0.65 for shrub and 0.68 for tree cover prediction. Multi-scale training incorporating features at 10, 30, 50, and 70 m resolution improved performance by 15% for shrub and 24% for tree compared to single-scale approaches. Feature importance analysis revealed that shrub detection relied primarily on red-edge bands and moisture indices, while tree detection depended heavily on SAR backscatters. Quantile histogram matching enabled successful model transfer from Foam Lake Community pasture to Aberdeen Community Pasture, with resulting maps indicating that total WPE exceeded 50% in both study areas, with shrubs occupying 23.7% (Foam Lake) and 18.5% (Aberdeen) of both regions at rates higher than 5% shrub cover. The present framework provides a scalable, cost-effective approach for operational woody encroachment monitoring, enabling early detection and targeted functional management interventions to preserve grassland ecosystems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".