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Thijs van der Plas

@vdplasthijs.bsky.social
2.1K followers 287 following 24 posts

Post-doc (AI for monitoring ecosystems) @ AI group, WUR. Previously Oxford DPhil, The Alan Turing Institute & Peak District NP. vdplasthijs.github.io

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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
but we’re very interested to understand these mechanisms more deeply and broadly. If this is of interest, please get in touch! Many thanks to the fantastic team: Jacob Bakermans, Vishal Nedungadi, Gabrielė Tijūnaitytė, Marc Rußwurm, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis arxiv.org/abs/2605.18667
arxiv.org
Better Together: Evaluating the Complementarity of Earth Embedding Models
Earth embedding models transform Earth observation data into embeddings uniquely tied to locations on the Earth's surface. These models are typically evaluated in isolation, comparing the downstream t...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Interestingly, complementarity is task- and location-dependent, not a fixed property of a model pair. But can we understand when and why embeddings are complementary? For a land cover task we showed that this is partially governed by the spatial scale of land cover classes, ...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
The broader implication: the greatest gains in geospatial AI may come not from a single, ever-larger model, but from combining models that each bring a genuinely different view of the same location. ..
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
We introduce an embedding complementarity index and evaluate four globally available Earth embedding models (AlphaEarth, Tessera, GeoCLIP, SatCLIP), solo, in all pairs, and jointly, across six downstream tasks. Indeed, fused embeddings beat the best single model in four out of six tasks. ...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
.. can complement each other. Yet evaluations almost always benchmark models in isolation: who performs best on task X? But because embeddings are indexed by location, they can simply be aligned and fused. So we asked a different question: are Earth embeddings better together? ...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Earth embedding models compress rich satellite and geospatial data into a vector representation of a location. But any single model only captures one "view" of that location, shaped by its training data, input modalities, and architecture. Different models see different things, which means they ...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Excited to share our new preprint: "Better Together: Evaluating the Complementarity of Earth Embedding Models"! Short summary in this thread! arxiv.org/abs/2605.18667
arxiv.org
Better Together: Evaluating the Complementarity of Earth Embedding Models
Earth embedding models transform Earth observation data into embeddings uniquely tied to locations on the Earth's surface. These models are typically evaluated in isolation, comparing the downstream t...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2504.03603
arxiv.org
Towards deployment-centric multimodal AI beyond vision and language
Multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) integrates diverse types of data via machine learning to improve understanding, prediction, and decision-making across disciplines such as healthcare, science, ...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
View-only: rdcu.be/eL0JC
rdcu.be
Towards deployment-centric multimodal AI beyond vision and language
Nature Machine Intelligence - Multimodal AI combines different types of data to improve decision-making in fields such as healthcare and engineering, but work so far has focused on vision and...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
This was a lot of fun to work on -- big thanks to everyone involved and particularly Xianyuan Liu and Haiping Lu for leading this effort!
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
Many great scientific challenges are both multimodal and multidisciplinary. In our perspective we discuss the additional challenges this brings for developing deployable AI, and provide recommendations to address these challenges early on.
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
Our perspective on deployment-centric, multimodal AI beyond vision and language is now out in Nature Machine Intelligence! www.nature.com/articles/s42...
nature.com
Towards deployment-centric multimodal AI beyond vision and language - Nature Machine Intelligence
Multimodal AI combines different types of data to improve decision-making in fields such as healthcare and engineering, but work so far has focused on vision and language models. To make these systems...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Code: github.com/LTER-LIFE/ll... [5/5]
github.com
GitHub - LTER-LIFE/llm-metadata-harvester: LLM metadata harvester
LLM metadata harvester. Contribute to LTER-LIFE/llm-metadata-harvester development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Paper: doi.org/10.1007/978-... [4/5]
doi.org
Flexible Metadata Harvesting for Ecology Using Large Language Models
Large, open datasets can accelerate ecological research, particularly by enabling researchers to develop new insights by reusing datasets from multiple sources. However, to find the most suitable datasets to combine and integrate, researchers must navigate diverse...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
We presented our tool at the recent EcoDL workshop at TPDL2025, and our paper and code are now both available open-access at the links below! Big thanks to the rest of the team, and please let us know any thoughts and suggestions as we continue to develop this tool! [3/5]
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
In a nutshell, we successfully used LLMs to flexibly extract and convert metadata of ecological datasets (e.g., by scraping datasets webpages), with equal accuracy for both structured and unstructured metadata. [2/5]
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Can LLMs do our 'digital dishes'? Or in other words, what are tedious, small tasks that researchers often face and could be automated by LLMs? We've worked on one such task: extracting dataset metadata and converting these to a single format to build a dataset knowledge base. [1/5]
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
Great read from Michael Pocock: Linking remote sensing, citizen science data and AI could transform environmental monitoring | UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-med...
ceh.ac.uk
Linking remote sensing, citizen science data and AI could transform environmental monitoring
In our new paper, published in Ecological Solutions and Evidence, we provided a perspective on how three areas of science – remote sensing, citizen science, and machine learning (a form of AI) – could...
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
There is still lots of scope for further improvements; if that's of interest please don't hesitate to get in touch!
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
We combined sentinel-2 images and UKBMS butterfly occurrence records to predict butterfly species presence from satellite data. We developed a soft contrastive loss that acts as a regulariser and improves prediction accuracy.
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
Published last week at the CVPR FGVC Workshop; our paper on "Predicting butterfly species presence from satellite imagery using soft contrastive regularisation". PDF (with links to data/code) available here: openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR...
openaccess.thecvf.com
CVPR 2025 Open Access Repository
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
With @david-alexander.bsky.social
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
In our latest perspective article, we outline how ML can overcome 4 current obstacles for large-scale, high-resolution monitoring of protected areas. doi.org/10.1002/2688... Hope this stimulates the conversation and provides a pathway of how ML research can be applied for monitoring PAs at scale.
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Reposted by Thijs van der Plas
Sara Beery @sarameghanbeery.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
🎯 How can we empower scientific discovery in millions of nature photos? Introducing INQUIRE: A benchmark testing if AI vision-language models can help scientists find biodiversity patterns- from disease symptoms to rare behaviors- hidden in vast image collections. Thread👇🧵
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Thijs van der Plas @vdplasthijs.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Hi, I'm using satellite data to predict species biodiversity! Could I be added please :) Thanks!
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Reposted by Thijs van der Plas
David Alexander @david-alexander.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Using computer vision and #MapReader software, we analysed the loss of field boundaries across the #PeakDistrict Since the 1950s, the White Peak has seen a 12% reduction-551 km lost from an original 4,814 km. A stark reminder of landscape change 📊🌿 storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5c89... #maps #GIS
storymaps.arcgis.com
Mapping the Past Against the Present
Past Landscapes, Present Discoveries: A Data Science Approach to Rediscovering Field Systems from Historic Ordnance Survey Maps
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