XIEG Holds 27th Salon for Scientific Exchange

The Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences held the 27th "Salon for Scientific Exchange" (SSE) on October 9, attracting over 40 researchers and students from both China and abroad to participate.

Dr. Emilio Guirado delivered a presentation on the applications of remote sensing and artificial intelligence in ecology. He began by introducing convolutional neural networks (CNN), which has been widely used for solving complex problems, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. He illustrated the applications of CNN through four compelling case studies. These included identifying forests in drylands, locating fairy circles, detecting plant trait diversity threshold in relation to aridity and grazing pressures, and counting global whale population.

After the presentation, participants discussed drivers for the formation of fairy circles, selection and processing of remote sensing images, and black box and prediction accuracy of CNN-based models, among others.

Dr. Emilio Guirado, currently working at the University of Alicante, Spain, specializes in the functioning of arid ecosystems and their biodiversity with a remote sensing and deep learning perspective. He has published numerous scientific articles in the most prestigious journals, such as Nature, Science, PNAS, and others.

Emilio Guirado delivers his presentation (Image by QIAO Jianfang)

Contact

LONG Huaping

Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography

E-mail: longhp@ms.xjb.ac.cn

Web: http://english.egi.cas.cn