Wildfires pose a significant global threat to ecosystems worldwide, with California experiencing recurring fires due to various factors, including climate, topographical features, vegetation patterns, and human activities. This study aims to develop a comprehensive wildfire risk map for California by applying the random forest (RF) algorithm, augmented with Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) through Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), to interpret model predictions. Model performance was assessed using both spatial and temporal validation strategies. The RF model demonstrated strong predictive performance, achieving near-perfect discrimination for grasslands (AUC = 0.996) and forests (AUC = 0.997). Spatial cross-validation revealed moderate transferability, yielding ROC-AUC values of 0.6155 for forests and 0.5416 for grasslands. In contrast, temporal split validation showed enhanced generalization, especially for forests (ROC-AUC = 0.6615, PR-AUC = 0.8423). SHAP-based XAI analysis identified key ecosystem-specific drivers: soil organic carbon, tree cover, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) emerged as the most influential in forests, whereas Land Surface Temperature (LST), elevation, and vegetation health indices were dominant in grasslands. District-level classification revealed that Central Valley and Northern Buttes districts had the highest concentration of high-risk grasslands, while Northern Buttes and North Coast Redwoods dominated forested high-risk areas. This RF-SHAP framework offers a robust, comprehensible, and adaptable method for assessing wildfire risks, enabling informed decisions and creating targeted strategies to mitigate dangers.

Environment Conservation Land Tiny prairie dogs' poop play a mighty role in grasslands Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Earth is made of cycles. If you think back to high school Earth science class, you might remember the water cycle, the rock cycle, and the oxygen cycle, to name just a few. These natural processes continuously recycle our planet's materials, maintaining the environment that hosts life as we know it. The nutrient cycle is another crucial example of our planet's constant churn.

Autonomous off-road navigation faces challenges due to diverse, unstructured environments, requiring robust perception with both geometric and semantic understanding. However, scarce densely labeled semantic data limits generalization across domains. Simulated data helps, but introduces domain adaptation issues. We propose COARSE, a semi-supervised domain adaptation framework for off-road semantic segmentation, leveraging sparse, coarse in-domain labels and densely labeled out-of-domain data. Using pretrained vision transformers, we bridge domain gaps with complementary pixel-level and patch-level decoders, enhanced by a collaborative pseudo-labeling strategy on unlabeled data. Evaluations on RUGD and Rellis-3D datasets show significant improvements of 9.7\% and 8.4\% respectively, versus only using coarse data. Tests on real-world off-road vehicle data in a multi-biome setting further demonstrate COARSE's applicability.

A major challenge for Multi-Agent Systems is enabling agents to adapt dynamically to diverse environments in which opponents and teammates may continually change. Agents trained using conventional methods tend to excel only within the confines of their training cohorts; their performance drops significantly when confronting unfamiliar agents. To address this shortcoming, we introduce Inverse Attention Agents that adopt concepts from the Theory of Mind, implemented algorithmically using an attention mechanism and trained in an end-to-end manner. Crucial to determining the final actions of these agents, the weights in their attention model explicitly represent attention to different goals. We furthermore propose an inverse attention network that deduces the ToM of agents based on observations and prior actions. The network infers the attentional states of other agents, thereby refining the attention weights to adjust the agent's final action. We conduct experiments in a continuous environment, tackling demanding tasks encompassing cooperation, competition, and a blend of both. They demonstrate that the inverse attention network successfully infers the attention of other agents, and that this information improves agent performance. Additional human experiments show that, compared to baseline agent models, our inverse attention agents exhibit superior cooperation with humans and better emulate human behaviors.

Grasslands are known for their high biodiversity and ability to provide multiple ecosystem services. Challenges in automating the identification of indicator plants are key obstacles to large-scale grassland monitoring. These challenges stem from the scarcity of extensive datasets, the distributional shifts between generic and grassland-specific datasets, and the inherent opacity of deep learning models. This paper delves into the latter two challenges, with a specific focus on transfer learning and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches to grassland monitoring, highlighting the novelty of XAI in this domain. We analyze various transfer learning methods to bridge the distributional gaps between generic and grassland-specific datasets. Additionally, we showcase how explainable AI techniques can unveil the model's domain adaptation capabilities, employing quantitative assessments to evaluate the model's proficiency in accurately centering relevant input features around the object of interest. This research contributes valuable insights for enhancing model performance through transfer learning and measuring domain adaptability with explainable AI, showing significant promise for broader applications within the agricultural community.

In this paper an autonomous system to detect and combat Rumex obtusifolius leveraging autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), small autonomous sprayer robots and 5G SA connectivity is presented. Rumex obtusifolius is a plant found on grassland that drains nutrients from surrounding plants and has lower nutritive value than the surrounding grass. High concentrations of it have to be combated in order to use the grass as feed for livestock. One or more UAV are controlled through 5G to survey the current working area and send back high-definition photos of the ground to an edge cloud server. There an AI algorithm using neural networks detects the Rumex obtusifolius and calculates its position using the UAVs position data. When plants are detected an optimal path is calculated and sent via 5G to the sprayer robot to get to them in minimal time. It will then move to the position of the broad-leafed dock and use an on-board camera and the edge cloud to verify the position of the plant and precisely spray crop protection only where the target plant is. The spraying robot and UAV are already operational, the training of the detection algorithm is still ongoing. The described system is being tested with a fixed private 5G SA network and a nomadic 5G SA network as public cellular networks are not performant enough in regards to low latency and upload bandwidth.

Information on the grass growth over a year is essential for some models simulating the use of this resource to feed animals on pasture or at barn with hay or grass silage. Unfortunately, this information is rarely available. The challenge is to reconstruct grass growth from two sources of information: usual daily climate data (rainfall, radiation, etc.) and cumulative growth over the year. We have to be able to capture the effect of seasonal climatic events which are known to distort the growth curve within the year. In this paper, we formulate this challenge as a problem of disaggregating the cumulative growth into a time series. To address this problem, our method applies time series forecasting using climate information and grass growth from previous time steps. Several alternatives of the method are proposed and compared experimentally using a database generated from a grassland process-based model. The results show that our method can accurately reconstruct the time series, independently of the use of the cumulative growth information.

Terrestrial vegetation is a critical component of global biogeochemical cycles and provides important ecosystem services to support human life [1]. Given its importance, it is essential to know the spatial-temporal variations of vegetation [2]. These variations are due to several determining factors such as global climate variability, climate gradients, and anthropogenic factors such as Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC). The diversity in climatic conditions and vegetation types pose different obstacles to monitoring and classifying land cover using remote sensing. Mexico is considered one of the mega-diverse countries on the planet due to its location in a transition zone between Nearctic and Neotropic regions making it more difficult for land use classification and monitoring. The anthropogenic factors, could be a trigger for deforestation and forest degradation [3] and have a severe impact on the global carbon cycle, soil erosion, hydrological cycles, and in general, affect on the ecosystem services that sustain society [4]. As a result, timely land cover monitoring and classification are of crucial importance for assessing gradual degradation-ecosystem processes. Furthermore, it is important to be in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) specifically SDG 15 concerning "Life on Land" [5].

In multi-agent games, the complexity of the environment can grow exponentially as the number of agents increases, so it is particularly challenging to learn good policies when the agent population is large. In this paper, we introduce Evolutionary Population Curriculum (EPC), a curriculum learning paradigm that scales up Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) by progressively increasing the population of training agents in a stage-wise manner. Furthermore, EPC uses an evolutionary approach to fix an objective misalignment issue throughout the curriculum: agents successfully trained in an early stage with a small population are not necessarily the best candidates for adapting to later stages with scaled populations. Concretely, EPC maintains multiple sets of agents in each stage, performs mix-and-match and fine-tuning over these sets and promotes the sets of agents with the best adaptability to the next stage. We implement EPC on a popular MARL algorithm, MADDPG, and empirically show that our approach consistently outperforms baselines by a large margin as the number of agents grows exponentially. The project page is https://sites.google.com/view/epciclr2020.

The timely knowledge of forage quality of grasslands is vital for matching the demands in animal feeding. Remote sensing (RS) is a promising tool for estimating field-scale forage quality compared with traditional methods, which usually do not provide equally detailed information. However, the applicability of RS prediction models depends on the variability of the underlying calibration data, which can be brought about by the inclusion of a multitude of grassland types and management practices in the model development. Major aims of this study were (i) to build forage quality estimation models for multiple grassland types based on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-borne imaging spectroscopy and (ii) to generate forage quality distribution maps using the best models obtained. The study examined data from eight grasslands in northern Hesse, Germany, which largely differed in terms of vegetation type and cutting regime. The UAV with a hyperspectral camera on board was utilised to acquire spectral images from the grasslands, and crude protein (CP) and acid detergent fibre (ADF) concentration of the forage was assessed at each cut.