Climplicit: Climatic Implicit Embeddings for Global Ecological Tasks (Papers Track)
Johannes Dollinger (University of Zurich); Damien Robert (University of Zurich); Elena Plekhanova (Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL); Lukas Drees (University of Zurich); Jan Dirk Wegner (University of Zurich)
Abstract
Deep learning on climatic data holds potential for macroecological applications. However, its adoption remains limited among scientists outside the deep learning community due to storage, compute, and technical expertise barriers. To address this, we introduce Climplicit, a spatio-temporal geolocation encoder pretrained to generate implicit climatic representations anywhere on Earth. By bypassing the need to download raw climatic rasters and train feature extractors, our model uses x3500 less disk space and significantly reduces computational needs for downstream tasks. We evaluate our Climplicit embeddings on biomes classification, species distribution modeling, and plant trait regression. We find that single-layer probing our Climplicit embeddings consistently performs better or on par with training a model from scratch on downstream tasks and overall better than alternative geolocation encoding models.