Explainable AI in Grassland Monitoring: Enhancing Model Performance and Domain Adaptability

Abstract: Grasslands are known for their high biodiversity and ability to provide multiple ecosystem services. Challenges in automating the identification of indicator plants are key obstacles to large-scale grassland monitoring. These challenges stem from the scarcity of extensive datasets, the distributional shifts between generic and grassland-specific datasets, and the inherent opacity of deep learning models. This paper delves into the latter two challenges, with a specific focus on transfer learning and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches to grassland monitoring, highlighting the novelty of XAI in this domain. We analyze various transfer learning methods to bridge the distributional gaps between generic and grassland-specific datasets. Additionally, we showcase how explainable AI techniques can unveil the model's domain adaptation capabilities, employing quantitative assessments to evaluate the model's proficiency in accurately centering relevant input features around the object of interest. This research contributes valuable insights for enhancing model performance through transfer learning and measuring domain adaptability with explainable AI, showing significant promise for broader applications within the agricultural community.