Below-ground Fungal Biodiversity Can be Monitored Using Self-Supervised Learning Satellite Features

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that self-supervised learning applied to satellite imagery can effectively predict and monitor underground fungal biodiversity at high spatial and temporal resolutions across large landscapes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SSL-based approach that surpasses existing methods in mapping below-ground fungal diversity using satellite data.

Findings

SSL features explain over 50% of species richness variance.

Achieves 10,000-fold increase in spatial resolution over previous techniques.

Detects potential decline in fungal diversity in ancient UK forests.

Abstract

Mycorrhizal fungi are vital to terrestrial ecosystem functioning. Yet monitoring their biodiversity at landscape scales is often unfeasible due to time and cost constraints. Current predictions suggest that 90\% of mycorrhizal diversity hotspots remain unprotected, opening questions of how to broadly and effectively map underground fungal communities. Here, we show that self-supervised learning (SSL) applied to satellite imagery can predict below-ground ectomycorrhizal fungal richness across diverse environments. Our models explain over half the variance in species richness across ~12,000 field samples spanning Europe and Asia. SSL-derived features prove to be the single most informative predictor, subsuming the majority of information contained in climate, soil, and land cover datasets. Using this approach, we achieve a 10,000-fold increase in spatial resolution over existing techniques, moving from 1km landscape averages to 10m habitat-scale observations with nearly no systematic bias. As satellite observations are dynamic rather than static, this enables temporal monitoring of below-ground biodiversity at landscape scales for the first time. We analyze multi-year trends in predicted fungal richness across UK National Park woodlands, finding that ancient forests may be losing ectomycorrhizal diversity at disproportionate rates. These results establish SSL satellite features as a scalable tool for extending sparse field observations to continuous, high-resolution biodiversity maps for monitoring the invisible half of terrestrial ecosystems.