Identifying compound weather drivers of forest biomass loss with generative deep learning

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Mohit Anand - , Chair of Data Analytics in Hydro Sciences, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Author)
  • Friedrich J. Bohn - , Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Author)
  • Gustau Camps-Valls - , University of Valencia (Author)
  • Rico Fischer - , Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Author)
  • Andreas Huth - , Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Author)
  • Lily Belle Sweet - , Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Author)
  • Jakob Zscheischler - , Chair of Data Analytics in Hydro Sciences, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Author)

Abstract

Globally, forests are net carbon sinks that partly mitigates anthropogenic climate change. However, there is evidence of increasing weather-induced tree mortality, which needs to be better understood to improve forest management under future climate conditions. Disentangling drivers of tree mortality is challenging because of their interacting behavior over multiple temporal scales. In this study, we take a data-driven approach to the problem. We generate hourly temperate weather data using a stochastic weather generator to simulate 160,000 years of beech, pine, and spruce forest dynamics with a forest gap model. These data are used to train a generative deep learning model (a modified variational autoencoder) to learn representations of three-year-long monthly weather conditions (precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation) in an unsupervised way. We then associate these weather representations with years of high biomass loss in the forests and derive weather prototypes associated with such years. The identified prototype weather conditions are associated with 5-22% higher median biomass loss compared to the median of all samples, depending on the forest type and the prototype. When prototype weather conditions co-occur, these numbers increase to 10-25%. Our research illustrates how generative deep learning can discover compounding weather patterns associated with extreme impacts.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere4
JournalEnvironmental Data Science
Volume3
Publication statusPublished - 12 Feb 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-6045-1629/work/197321859

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • compound events, extreme events, forest mortality, generative deep learning, variational autoencoder