EUNIS Habitat Maps: Enhancing Thematic and Spatial Resolution for Europe through Machine Learning

The EUNIS habitat classification is crucial for categorising European habitats, supporting European policy on nature conservation and implementing the Nature Restoration Law. To meet the growing demand for detailed and accurate habitat information, we provide spatial predictions for 260 EUNIS habitat types at hierarchical level 3, together with independent validation and uncertainty analyses. Using ensemble machine learning models, together with high-resolution satellite imagery and ecologically meaningful climatic, topographic and edaphic variables, we produced a European habitat map indicating the most probable EUNIS habitat at 100-m resolution across Europe. Additionally, we provide information on prediction uncertainty and the most probable habitats at level 3 within each EUNIS level 1 formation. This product is particularly useful for both conservation and restoration purposes. Predictions were cross-validated at European scale using a spatial block cross-validation and evaluated against independent data from France (forests only), the Netherlands and Austria. The habitat maps obtained strong predictive performances on the validation datasets with distinct trade-offs in terms of recall and precision across habitat formations.

RapidAI4EO: Mono- and Multi-temporal Deep Learning models for Updating the CORINE Land Cover Product

In the remote sensing community, Land Use Land Cover (LULC) classification with satellite imagery is a main focus of current research activities. Accurate and appropriate LULC classification, however, continues to be a challenging task. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of multi-temporal (monthly time series) compared to mono-temporal (single time step) satellite images for multi-label classification using supervised learning on the RapidAI4EO dataset. As a first step, we trained our CNN model on images at a single time step for multi-label classification, i.e. mono-temporal. We incorporated time-series images using a LSTM model to assess whether or not multi-temporal signals from satellites improves CLC classification. The results demonstrate an improvement of approximately 0.89% in classifying satellite imagery on 15 classes using a multi-temporal approach on monthly time series images compared to the mono-temporal approach. Using features from multi-temporal or mono-temporal images, this work is a step towards an efficient change detection and land monitoring approach.