Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used numerical tools that rely on correlations between geolocated presences (and possibly absences) and environmental predictors to model the ecological preferences of species. Recently, SDMs exploiting deep learning and remote sensing images have emerged and have demonstrated high predictive performance. In particular, it has been shown that one of the key advantages of these models (called deep-SDMs) is their ability to capture the spatial structure of the landscape, unlike prior models. In this paper, we examine whether the temporal dimension of remote sensing images can also be exploited by deep-SDMs. Indeed, satellites such as Sentinel-2 are now providing data with a high temporal revisit, and it is likely that the resulting time-series of images contain relevant information about the seasonal variations of the environment and vegetation. To confirm this hypothesis, we built a substantial and original dataset (called DeepOrchidSeries) aimed at modeling the distribution of orchids on a global scale based on Sentinel-2 image time series. It includes around 1 million occurrences of orchids worldwide, each being paired with a 12-month-long time series of high-resolution images (640 x 640 m RGB+IR patches centered on the geolocated observations). This ambitious dataset enabled us to train several deep-SDMs based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) whose input was extended to include the temporal dimension. To quantify the contribution of the temporal dimension, we designed a novel interpretability methodology based on temporal permutation tests, temporal sampling, and temporal averaging. We show that the predictive performance of the model is greatly increased by the seasonality information contained in the temporal series. In particular, occurrence-poor species and diversity-rich regions are the ones that benefit the most from this improvement, revealing the importance of habitat's temporal dynamics to characterize species distribution.

Making the most of multispectral image time-series is a promising but still relatively under-explored research direction because of the complexity of jointly analyzing spatial, spectral and temporal information. Capturing and characterizing temporal dynamics is one of the important and challenging issues. Our new method paves the way to capture real data dynamics and should eventually benefit applications like unmixing or classification. Dealing with time-series dynamics classically requires the knowledge of a dynamical model and an observation model. The former may be incorrect or computationally hard to handle, thus motivating data-driven strategies aiming at learning dynamics directly from data. In this paper, we adapt neural network architectures to learn periodic dynamics of both simulated and real multispectral time-series. We emphasize the necessity of choosing the right state variable to capture periodic dynamics and show that our models can reproduce the average seasonal dynamics of vegetation using only one year of training data.

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