Invasive plant species are detrimental to the ecology of both agricultural and wildland areas. Euphorbia esula, or leafy spurge, is one such plant that has spread through much of North America from Eastern Europe. When paired with contemporary computer vision systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, offer the means to track expansion of problem plants, such as leafy spurge, and improve chances of controlling these weeds. We gathered a dataset of leafy spurge presence and absence in grasslands of western Montana, USA, then surveyed these areas with a commercial drone. We trained image classifiers on these data, and our best performing model, a pre-trained DINOv2 vision transformer, identified leafy spurge with 0.84 accuracy (test set). This result indicates that classification of leafy spurge is tractable, but not solved. We release this unique dataset of labelled and unlabelled, aerial drone imagery for the machine learning community to explore. Improving classification performance of leafy spurge would benefit the fields of ecology, conservation, and remote sensing alike. Code and data are available at our website: leafy-spurge-dataset.github.io.

At this point, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has become a video game phenomenon. Much has been said about how it's a new take on the dusty old Zelda formula, or on how it represents a fresh direction for Nintendo in general, by buoying its new Switch console. But Breath of the Wild deserves just as much credit for how it subverts and reaffirms the power of the open world. There are two key hallmarks of the open world genre: There is a big map to freely traverse, and there's a lot of stuff to do on that map. It's a formula that's been refined over the past few iterations of Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls and Far Cry, among others of that ilk.

I have been writing about video games full time for nearly seven years now, and I don't know if I've ever experienced a month like this past one before. Not to complain about playing and reviewing games for a living, but wow this has been intense. I started with 30 hours of Horizon Zero Dawn in a week in order to write that review. Then, my Switch arrived, and I sunk about 80 hours in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I wasn't reviewing, but wanted to play and write about constantly all the same since it's arguably one of the best games ever made. And I only put that game down when my review copy of Mass Effect: Andromeda showed up, and to hit that embargo, I put in 60 hours in six days.

When it comes to performance, most people think that Radeon graphics cards hold an edge over Nvidia's GeForce army in DirectX 12 games on account of the dedicated asynchronous shaders lurking inside AMD's hardware. That's never been the universal truth that some people think it is--async compute is just one, not-always-utilized feature of DX12--and today Nvidia's busting the myth even more with a driver update designed to supercharge GeForce performance in DirectX 12 games. "By refining the code in our own driver, and working side-by-side with game developers, Nvidia has delivered performance increases by an average of 16% across DirectX 12 titles," senior PR manager Brian Burke said in a press release. The stated performance increases in Hitman and Rise of the Tomb Raider are the sort of massive leaps you'd normally see by upgrading your graphics card, say, from the GeForce GTX 1080 to the ferocious new GTX 1080 Ti. Speaking of which, the DirectX 12 improvements were present in the review drivers Nvidia sent to the press for GTX 1080 Ti testing.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands comes out next week. I know, I almost forgot about it too. But if an open world filled with guns, high-speed chases and sniping over huge distances in Bolivia is more your speed than robotic dinosaurs or some random game with a princess, you might be interested to know what Wildlands has in store after launch. You know, for when you've long since finished its campaign and dominated the competition on the packed-in multiplayer maps. First up: there's a season pass because this is a modern video game being released by a major publisher.

On tap are at least four previously announced games, but there could be some room to address the future of "Assassin's Creed." The Ubisoft E3 2016 live stream begins at 1 p.m. PDT (4 p.m. EDT). After a rocky 2015 that saw the slumping sales of "Assassin's Creed" and the modest start to "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege," 2016 has been a massive success for Ubisoft. "Far Cry Primal" was a surprise hit, but it's hard to have any video game conversation without talking about "The Division," which had the biggest first week for a new game franchise, with 330 million in sales. Despite a rough patch of glitches and cheating, there's a dedicated audience for the third-person shooter.