Will This Tree Survive to the Next Survey?
Given its size, its condition last time, its species and how well the climate suits it, will this tree still be alive at the next forest inventory? Foresters plan planting and thinning around exactly this.
The table
Trees measured in repeated forest inventories, with previous status and size, species, plot and climatic suitability, and whether each tree survived. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Local Neighbourhood and Regional Climate Explain Tree Performance, 7,277 rows by 14 columns, licensed CC0. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.81. At 7,277 rows and 13 features, TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium take the table as it is. The others can't take a table this size, so the walkthrough leaves them out.
Walkthrough
Load it from the catalogue
Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.
import pandas as pd from welt import Client with Client() as client: item = client.research_datasets(q="tree performance climate suitability", limit=1)["items"][0] info = client.research_dataset(item["id"]) data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"]) target = info["targets"][0] target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)Pick the rows
Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end, and keep the rest for the models to learn from.
known = data.dropna(subset=[target]) new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1) table = known.drop(new_rows.index)Compare the models and predict
The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. ROC AUC runs from 0.5, a coin toss, to 1, a perfect ranking, and a lower Brier score means the probabilities can be trusted more. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.
with Client() as client: evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="classification", seed=7, models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"]) model = evaluation.fit() print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "roc_auc_mean", "brier_mean"]]) features = new_rows.drop(columns=target) print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features), "probability": model.predict_proba(features).max(axis=1)}))
What you get
Try it
Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "tree performance climate suitability", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".
Open with
- Type
- Use case
- Area
- Biology
- Question
- Will This Tree Survive to the Next Survey?
- Model
- TabICLv2, Kumo Tabular Medium
- Data
- Local Neighbourhood and Regional Climate Explain Tree Performance, 7,277 rows
- For
- Foresters and ecologists
- Licence
- CC0