Deep learning for crown profile modelling of Pinus yunnanensis secondary forests in Southwest China

Accurate information concerning crown profile is critical in analyzing biological processes and providing a more accurate estimate of carbon balance, which is conducive to sustainable forest management and planning. The similarities between the types of data addressed with LSTM algorithms and crown profile data make a compelling argument for the integration of deep learning into the crown profile modeling. Thus, the aim was to study the application of deep learning method LSTM and its variant algorithms in the crown profile modeling, using the crown profile database from Pinus yunnanensis secondary forests in Yunnan province, in southwest China. Furthermore, the SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) was used to interpret the predictions of ensemble or deep learning models. The results showed that LSTM’s variant algorithms was competitive with traditional Vanila LSTM, but substantially outperformed ensemble learning model LightGBM. Specifically, the proposed Hybrid LSTM-LightGBM and Integrated LSTM-LightGBM have achieved a best forecasting performance on training set and testing set respectively. Furthermore, the feature importance analysis of LightGBM and Vanila LSTM presented that there were more factors that contribute significantly to Vanila LSTM model compared to LightGBM model. This phenomenon can explain why deep learning outperforms ensemble learning when there are more interrelated features.