environmental monitoring services

Abstract: Accurate soil moisture estimation is critical for precision agriculture, influencing irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting strategies. Traditional methods primarily rely on meteorological and soil property data, while recent approaches incorporate visual modalities such as aerial and geospatial imagery. However, these high-resolution images are expensive and computationally demanding to analyze. In this work, we propose Soil Moisture Distillation (SMD), a Knowledge Distillation (KD)-based multimodal learning framework that leverages unimodal teachers to enhance multimodal soil moisture estimation. SMD surpasses not only traditional multimodal fusion techniques, including MIS-ME, but also outperforms unimodal models, demonstrating the benefits of guided unimodal knowledge transfer. Additionally, we conduct a comparative analysis of soil patches and crop images, showing that crop images provide superior visual cues, leading to improved prediction accuracy. SMD achieves a 2% improvement in MAPE for soil patches and 1.2% for crops over state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging both meteorological and visual data through knowledge distillation for enhanced soil moisture forecasting.

Abstract: Camera-trap species classification is dominated by large models from well-resourced organisations, which often lack the species-level distinctions regional conservation needs, such as native red versus invasive grey squirrels in the UK. We ask whether open weights let a small team with a modest dataset and a single GPU take a real part in AI development. We fine-tuned the open DeepFaune classifier on 28 UK classes, paired it with the unmodified MegaDetector v6, and compared the resulting DeepFaune-UK v1.2 with DeepFaune v1.5.0 and SpeciesNet on 20,212 hand-verified MammalWeb citizen-science images, after removing sequences sharing any of 1,039 images with our training archive. DeepFaune-UK achieved a strict image-level accuracy of 88.8%, including empty frames, against 56.5% and 59.0% for the baselines, but at DeepFaune's coarser label resolution DeepFaune v1.5.0 was more accurate, though not significantly under contributor resampling (91.4% vs. 88.8%). As DeepFaune v1.5.0 uses a newer DINOv3-based classifier, we applied the identical recipe, without new data, to that classifier. The resulting DeepFaune-UK v1.3 reached 90.6% strict accuracy, narrowed the like-for-like gap to 0.8 points and reduced roe deer misclassified as fallow deer by 69%. On 1,850 images from the 26 contributors with no overlapping images, the three DeepFaune-based models did not differ significantly (90.5%, 90.6%, 89.9% like-for-like). Fine-tuning on 10% of the training crops (about 150 per class) gave out-of-distribution accuracy similar to using all of them, and a DINOv2 run on this subset took about 22 minutes with under 4 GB of GPU memory. Open weights thus make regional model development feasible for small teams, but the largest like-for-like gain came from a newer base model trained by others, so this democratisation depends on large actors continuing to release open weights, under licences that may change.

Abstract: As climate change intensifies, floods are becoming more frequent and destructive, making accurate flood understanding an urgent priority. However, existing vision-language models perform poorly on flood-related tasks, suffering from attentional bias and inaccurate descriptions of flood magnitude. To bridge this gap, we construct the first large-scale remote sensing flood multi-modal benchmark that supports language-level flood understanding and pixel-level flood segmentation. The benchmark contains 131,200 flood image patches and corresponding 443,100 textual descriptions for flood severity and evolution. Based on this benchmark, we propose FloodVLM-Pix, a language-guided pixel-level flood understanding model that includes a flood prior module and a multi-temporal flood pixel decoder to achieve accurate flood understanding. The flood prior module automatically distills sub-region flood spatial priors and inputs priors into FloodVLM-Pix, solving the attentional bias problem in flood language understanding. The flood pixel decoder introduces a novel general-specific feature fusion mechanism to address performance degradation caused by interference (e.g., clouds or mountain shadows) during flood segmentation. Experiments on FloodVL-Pix demonstrate that FloodVLM-Pix improves both flood description quality and pixel-level flood segmentation performance compared with state-of-the-art VLMs and flood segmentation models. Our code and data will be released at https://github.com/Haomiaoyanmeng/FloodPix.

Abstract: Geostationary satellite observations are important for wildfire detection and monitoring. The current study evaluates machine learning models for MTG FCI near-real-time fire detection in 1- and 2-km spatial configurations and compares them with threshold-based algorithms. The models were trained and evaluated using VIIRS fire reference data across diverse ecological regions in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The key results are that 1-km models significantly outperform both their 2-km variants and operational threshold products. The constructed 1-km models achieved F1 scores higher by up to 0.36 compared to baseline products. Importantly, the 1-km models detected small fires with higher probability compared to competing models. Finally, the models robustly detected fires up to 260 min earlier than baseline products. To support opensource applications, our trained models are publicly available.

Abstract: Leaf-wood segmentation of individual trees from LiDAR point clouds is essential for quantitative structure models (QSMs) used in non-destructive biomass estimation. Existing segmentation methods typically exclude radiometric features (e.g., intensity, return number) to maximize cross-sensor compatibility. We challenge this design choice by evaluating cross-site and cross-platform generalization: training on the public Heidelberg dataset (terrestrial TLS, 1550nm) and testing on a novel dataset from Ontario, Canada (RPA-LS, 905nm). Results show that geometry-only methods - including state-of-the-art deep learning models trained on high-density LiDAR datasets - fail to generalize to the sparse, top-down geometry of aerial scans, achieving F1 scores <= 0.56. Incorporating radiometric features (intensity, return number, number of returns) improves F1 to 0.61, but more critically, increases wood recall by 119% from 0.16 to 0.35. Furthermore, geometry-only approaches often result in fragmented stem and branch components. We find that leveraging radiometric features preserves greater structural connectivity, resulting in more coherent architectures that are better suited for QSM reconstruction. We demonstrate that while geometric patterns are view-dependent and prone to overfitting scan patterns, radiometric features encode physical material properties that generalize across disparate sensors and environments.