Integration of Deep-Learning and Species Distribution Models for Classification of Animal Species of the Brazilian Fauna

Abstract The automated classification of animals from photos is important in ecology and conservation biology for organizing and understanding the immense diversity of species, as well as facilitating effective conservation and management practices. It is equally important for disease surveillance systems, allowing prompt detection of anomalies in species distributions and boosting citizen-scientist platforms by making user-reported data more accurate and convenient. Image classification uses photos and can also rely on the geographical locations of animals to improve performance. While image classification models have difficulties in classifying low-quality images, unbalanced datasets, and with a small number of images, species distribution models have difficulty in classifying species that coexist in a given region. We propose here strategies for combining image classification models based on deep neural networks with species distribution models using genetic algorithms. The proposal is applied to a real-world dataset comprising fifteen classes of animals from the Brazilian fauna obtained from Fiocruz’s citizen-scientist Wildlife Health Information System (SISS-Geo). The SISS-Geo photos portray the reality of animals in their environments, with varying quality, and pose numerous difficulties for classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed integration consistently outperforms standalone models. While individual SDMs achieve Top-1 accuracies of 27.79% (MaxEnt) and 31.76% (Bioclim), and CNN-based classifiers reach 58.17% with ResNet50 and 64.13% with ResNet-152, the hybrid strategies yield substantial improvements. The genetic algorithm–based integration with a single global weight achieves up to 67.96% Top-1 accuracy, whereas the class-specific integration using fifteen parameters attains the best overall performance, reaching 69.03%. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes Funding information The authors thank the support provided by CNPq, Capes, FAPEMIG, UFJF, and Fiocruz. Abbreviations - SDM - species distribution model - CNN - convolutional neural network - GA - genetic algorithm