Abstract
The tropical rainforests are the largest reserves of terrestrial carbon and therefore, the future of these rainforests is a question that is of immense importance in the geoscience research community. With the recent severe Amazonian droughts in 2005 and 2010 and on-going drought in the Congo region for more than two decades, there is growing concern that these forests could succumb to precipitation reduction, causing extensive carbon release and feedback to the carbon cycle. However, there is no single ecosystem model that quantifies the relationship between vegetation health in these rainforests and climatic factors. Small scale studies have used statistical correlation measure and simple linear regression to model climate-vegetation interactions, but suffer from the lack of comprehensive data representation as well as simplistic assumptions about dependency of the target on the covariates. In this paper we use genetic programming (GP) based symbolic regression for discovering equations that govern the vegetation climate dynamics in the rainforests. Expecting micro-regions within the rainforests to have unique characteristics compared to the overall general characteristics, we use a modified regression-tree based hierarchical partitioning of the space to build individual models for each partition. The discovery of these equations reveal very interesting characteristics about the Amazon and the Congo rainforests. Our method GP-tree shows that the rainforests exhibit tremendous resiliency in the face of extreme climatic events by adapting to changing conditions.
A. Kodali—Currently at AllState Innovations.
M. Szubert—Currently at Google Inc., Zürich.
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Acknowledgments
This research is supported in part by the NASA Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program’s grant (NNX15AH48G) and in part by the NASA contract NNA-16BD14C. The authors would also like to thank Dr. Ramakrishna Nemani, a senior Earth Scientist and an expert on this topic, for his insightful comments and perspective on some of the research findings.
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Kodali, A., Szubert, M., Das, K., Ganguly, S., Bongard, J. (2018). Understanding Climate-Vegetation Interactions in Global Rainforests Through a GP-Tree Analysis. In: Auger, A., Fonseca, C., Lourenço, N., Machado, P., Paquete, L., Whitley, D. (eds) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XV. PPSN 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99253-2_42
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