EcoCast: A Spatio-Temporal Model for Continual Biodiversity and Climate Risk Forecasting

TL;DR

EcoCast is a novel spatio-temporal transformer-based model that provides high-resolution, near-term biodiversity risk forecasts using multisource data, supporting conservation efforts amid climate change.

Contribution

It introduces EcoCast, a continual learning-enabled model that integrates satellite, climate, and citizen science data for biodiversity forecasting in Africa.

Findings

EcoCast outperforms a Random Forest baseline in species distribution prediction.

The model demonstrates effective spatio-temporal environmental dependency modeling.

EcoCast supports operational biodiversity risk forecasting with multi-modal data integration.

Abstract

Increasing climate change and habitat loss are driving unprecedented shifts in species distributions. Conservation professionals urgently need timely, high-resolution predictions of biodiversity risks, especially in ecologically diverse regions like Africa. We propose EcoCast, a spatio-temporal model designed for continual biodiversity and climate risk forecasting. Utilizing multisource satellite imagery, climate data, and citizen science occurrence records, EcoCast predicts near-term (monthly to seasonal) shifts in species distributions through sequence-based transformers that model spatio-temporal environmental dependencies. The architecture is designed with support for continual learning to enable future operational deployment with new data streams. Our pilot study in Africa shows promising improvements in forecasting distributions of selected bird species compared to a Random Forest baseline, highlighting EcoCast's potential to inform targeted conservation policies. By demonstrating an end-to-end pipeline from multi-modal data ingestion to operational forecasting, EcoCast bridges the gap between cutting-edge machine learning and biodiversity management, ultimately guiding data-driven strategies for climate resilience and ecosystem conservation throughout Africa.