What is GeoAI - and how can it help making exact science from something as inexact and complex as water flow in the environment?

In the opening words of their latest publication, the fluvial and hydrological scientists from University of Turku, University of Oulu and the Finnish Environment Institute lay out how mysterious flowing water is, and how challenging it has been doing exact science on it before the computer revolution started: "Hydrology and fluvial research are inexact fields of science, with a large extent of epistemic uncertainty and limited knowledge about the system’s complexity, structure, and functioning".

However, things are changing fast. Advances in the use of automatic sensors in monitoring, environmental 3D scanners, and high-resolution remote sensing from different sources has considerably increased the amount and the quality of data on our freshwater.

The first author Carlos Gonzales Inca from University of Turku explains: "GeoAI provides new data analytical tools and methods to gain insight into hydrological and fluvial system functioning and discover unseen patterns and trends that cannot be unraveled with the traditional approach. The current GeoAI application still has some challenges in hydrological and fluvial studies as it has low interpretability, explainability, and generalization. However, GeoAI development is rapidly moving toward more process-guided GeoAI models to overcome this."

Artificial intelligence for rivers

The authors are part of the Freshwater Competence Centre, a new key player in the Finnish freshwater research. Their latest research equipment, long and extensive expertise as well as time series data collected consistently over the years - the competence centre is aiming to change the course of Finnish freshwater science.

Their new open science publication is focusing on a concept called GeoAI. GeoAI combines spatial data science, Artificial intelligence, machine learning and big geospatial data. The Competence Centre has made an overview of latest advances and applications of GeoAI in the fields of fluvial research and hydrology - an up-to-date summary on how modern technology is benefiting freshwater research of today.

Read the latest GeoAI publication of Freshwater Competence Centre. The cover image below shows the increase of GeoAI and machine learning publications over the last two decades.

Citation

Gonzales-Inca, C., Calle, M., Croghan, D., Torabi Haghighi, A., Marttila, H., Silander, J., Alho, P., 2022. Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in the Integrated Hydrological and Fluvial Systems Modeling: Review of Current Applications and Trends.?Water 14, 2211.?https://doi.org/10.3390/w14142211