SatBird: Bird Species Distribution Modeling with Remote Sensing and Citizen Science Data
M\'elisande Teng, Amna Elmustafa, Benjamin Akera, Yoshua Bengio, Hager, Radi Abdelwahed, Hugo Larochelle, David Rolnick

TL;DR
SatBird introduces a novel approach to mapping bird species distributions using satellite imagery and citizen science data, enabling scalable ecosystem modeling across different regions and seasons.
Contribution
The paper presents SatBird, a new dataset and task for predicting bird encounter rates from satellite images, integrating remote sensing and citizen science data for biodiversity monitoring.
Findings
Benchmark results with state-of-the-art models provided.
Dataset includes locations in the USA and Kenya for diverse data regimes.
Demonstrates potential for scalable, global ecosystem modeling.
Abstract
Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, impacting ecosystem services necessary to ensure food, water, and human health and well-being. Understanding the distribution of species and their habitats is crucial for conservation policy planning. However, traditional methods in ecology for species distribution models (SDMs) generally focus either on narrow sets of species or narrow geographical areas and there remain significant knowledge gaps about the distribution of species. A major reason for this is the limited availability of data traditionally used, due to the prohibitive amount of effort and expertise required for traditional field monitoring. The wide availability of remote sensing data and the growing adoption of citizen science tools to collect species observations data at low cost offer an opportunity for improving biodiversity monitoring and enabling the modelling of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSpecies Distribution and Climate Change · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation · Remote Sensing in Agriculture
MethodsSparse Evolutionary Training · Focus
