MIRANDA: MId-feature RANk-adversarial Domain Adaptation toward climate change-robust ecological forecasting with deep learning

Abstract

Plant phenology modelling aims to predict the timing of seasonal phases, such as leaf-out or flowering, from meteorological time series. Reliable predictions are crucial for anticipating ecosystem responses to climate change. While phenology modelling has traditionally relied on mechanistic approaches, deep learning methods have recently been proposed as flexible, data-driven alternatives with often superior performance. However, mechanistic models tend to outperform deep networks when data distribution shifts are induced by climate change. Domain Adaptation (DA) techniques could help address this limitation. Yet, unlike standard DA settings, climate change induces a temporal continuum of domains and involves both a covariate and label shift, with warmer records and earlier start of spring. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Mid-feature Rank-adversarial Domain Adaptation (MIRANDA). Whereas conventional adversarial methods enforce domain invariance on final latent representations, an approach that does not explicitly address label shift, we apply adversarial regularization to intermediate features. Moreover, instead of a binary domain-classification objective, we employ a rank-based objective that enforces year-invariance in the learned meteorological representations. On a country-scale dataset spanning 70 years and comprising 67,800 phenological observations of 5 tree species, we demonstrate that, unlike conventional DA approaches, MIRANDA improves robustness to climatic distribution shifts and narrows the performance gap with mechanistic models.