Intact forest landscapeAn intact forest landscape (IFL) is an unbroken natural landscape of a forest ecosystem and its habitat–plant community components, in an extant forest zone. An IFL is a natural environment with no signs of significant human activity or habitat fragmentation, and of sufficient size to contain, support, and maintain the complex of indigenous biodiversity of viable populations of a wide range of genera and species, and their ecological effects. IFLs are estimated to cover 23 percent of forest ecosystems (13.
ForestA forest is an area of land dominated by trees. Hundreds of definitions of forest are used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land use, legal standing, and ecological function. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines a forest as, "Land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban use.
Forest managementForest management is a branch of forestry concerned with overall administrative, legal, economic, and social aspects, as well as scientific and technical aspects, such as silviculture, protection, and forest regulation. This includes management for timber, aesthetics, recreation, urban values, water, wildlife, inland and nearshore fisheries, wood products, plant genetic resources, and other forest resource values. Management objectives can be for conservation, utilisation, or a mixture of the two.
Machine learningMachine learning (ML) is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines 'discover' their 'own' algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. Recently, generative artificial neural networks have been able to surpass results of many previous approaches.
Old-growth forestAn old-growth forest, sometimes synonymous with primary forest, virgin forest, late seral forest, primeval forest, first-growth forest, or mature forestis a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance, and thereby exhibits unique ecological features, and might be classified as a climax community. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defines primary forests as naturally regenerated forests of native tree species where there are no clearly visible indications of human activity and the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed.
Explainable artificial intelligenceExplainable AI (XAI), also known as Interpretable AI, or Explainable Machine Learning (XML), either refers to an AI system over which it is possible for humans to retain intellectual oversight, or to the methods to achieve this. The main focus is usually on the reasoning behind the decisions or predictions made by the AI which are made more understandable and transparent. XAI counters the "black box" tendency of machine learning, where even the AI's designers cannot explain why it arrived at a specific decision.
Deep learningDeep learning is part of a broader family of machine learning methods, which is based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. The adjective "deep" in deep learning refers to the use of multiple layers in the network. Methods used can be either supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.
MapA map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes. Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although most commonly used to depict geography, maps may represent any space, real or fictional, without regard to context or scale, such as in brain mapping, DNA mapping, or computer network topology mapping.
Topographic mapIn modern mapping, a topographic map or topographic sheet is a type of map characterized by large-scale detail and quantitative representation of relief features, usually using contour lines (connecting points of equal elevation), but historically using a variety of methods. Traditional definitions require a topographic map to show both natural and artificial features. A topographic survey is typically based upon a systematic observation and published as a map series, made up of two or more map sheets that combine to form the whole map.
Artificial neural networkArtificial neural networks (ANNs, also shortened to neural networks (NNs) or neural nets) are a branch of machine learning models that are built using principles of neuronal organization discovered by connectionism in the biological neural networks constituting animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected units or nodes called artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. Each connection, like the synapses in a biological brain, can transmit a signal to other neurons.
Royal forestA royal forest, occasionally known as a kingswood (silva regis), is an area of land with different definitions in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The term forest in the ordinary modern understanding refers to an area of wooded land; however, the original medieval sense was closer to the modern idea of a "preserve" – i.e. land legally set aside for specific purposes such as royal hunting – with less emphasis on its composition. There are also differing and contextual interpretations in Continental Europe derived from the Carolingian and Merovingian legal systems.
Tropical forestTropical forests (a.k.a. jungle) are forested landscapes in tropical regions: i.e. land areas approximately bounded by the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn, but possibly affected by other factors such as prevailing winds. Some tropical forest types are difficult to categorize. While forests in temperate areas are readily categorized on the basis of tree canopy density, such schemes do not work well in tropical forests. There is no single scheme that defines what a forest is, in tropical regions or elsewhere.
Feature learningIn machine learning, feature learning or representation learning is a set of techniques that allows a system to automatically discover the representations needed for feature detection or classification from raw data. This replaces manual feature engineering and allows a machine to both learn the features and use them to perform a specific task. Feature learning is motivated by the fact that machine learning tasks such as classification often require input that is mathematically and computationally convenient to process.
Tree lineThe tree line is the edge of the habitat at which trees are capable of growing. It is found at high elevations and high latitudes. Beyond the tree line, trees cannot tolerate the environmental conditions (usually low temperatures, extreme snowpack, or associated lack of available moisture). The tree line is sometimes distinguished from a lower timberline, which is the line below which trees form a forest with a closed canopy. At the tree line, tree growth is often sparse, stunted, and deformed by wind and cold.
Convolutional neural networkConvolutional neural network (CNN) is a regularized type of feed-forward neural network that learns feature engineering by itself via filters (or kernel) optimization. Vanishing gradients and exploding gradients, seen during backpropagation in earlier neural networks, are prevented by using regularized weights over fewer connections. For example, for each neuron in the fully-connected layer 10,000 weights would be required for processing an image sized 100 × 100 pixels.
Remote sensingRemote sensing is the acquisition of information about an object or phenomenon without making physical contact with the object, in contrast to in situ or on-site observation. The term is applied especially to acquiring information about Earth and other planets. Remote sensing is used in numerous fields, including geophysics, geography, land surveying and most Earth science disciplines (e.g. exploration geophysics, hydrology, ecology, meteorology, oceanography, glaciology, geology); it also has military, intelligence, commercial, economic, planning, and humanitarian applications, among others.
Forest ecologyForest ecology is the scientific study of the interrelated patterns, processes, flora, fauna and ecosystems in forests. The management of forests is known as forestry, silviculture, and forest management. A forest ecosystem is a natural woodland unit consisting of all plants, animals, and micro-organisms (Biotic components) in that area functioning together with all of the non-living physical (abiotic) factors of the environment. Forests have an enormously important role to play in the global ecosystem.
Secondary forestA secondary forest (or second-growth forest) is a forest or woodland area which has regenerated through largely natural processes after human-caused disturbances, such as timber harvest or agriculture clearing, or equivalently disruptive natural phenomena. It is distinguished from an old-growth forest (primary or primeval forest), which has not recently undergone such disruption, and complex early seral forest, as well as third-growth forests that result from harvest in second growth forests.
DataIn common usage and statistics, data (USˈdætə; UKˈdeɪtə) is a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally. A datum is an individual value in a collection of data. Data is usually organized into structures such as tables that provide additional context and meaning, and which may themselves be used as data in larger structures.
Road mapA road map, route map, or street map is a map that primarily displays roads and transport links rather than natural geographical information. It is a type of navigational map that commonly includes political boundaries and labels, making it also a type of political map. In addition to roads and boundaries, road maps often include points of interest, such as prominent businesses or buildings, tourism sites, parks and recreational facilities, hotels and restaurants, as well as airports and train stations.
