arXiv subjects

César Leblanc

Publications and source records attributed to César Leblanc.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

To Trust or Not to Trust: Authors' Response to AI-based Reviews

Large language models are increasingly discussed and used as tools that may assist with scholarly peer review, but empirical evidence regarding how authors use and perceive AI-based feedback remains limited. This paper reports findings from two independent pilot studies on authors' use and perceptions of AI-based auxiliary review at two computer science venues. After the review release, authors were invited to complete an anonymous post-review questionnaire about the AI review's usefulness, trustworthiness, agreement with human reviews, practical value for revision, perceived inaccuracies, and consent. The final dataset included 56 analyzable responses from authors of 40 papers; closed-ended items were summarized using descriptive statistics, and open-ended responses were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Most respondents (83.9%) considered the AI-based review useful, and 80.4% reported that it identified issues not mentioned by human reviewers. This perceived added value translated into action: 82.1% reported using at least some AI feedback in their camera-ready version. However, the authors did not treat the AI review as equivalent to a human review. They generally trusted it less than the human reviews and found human feedback clearer, even though 25.0% described at least some human reviews as not very useful. Reported problems with the AI review were usually limited: 51.8% reported minor inaccuracies, while 16.1% reported clearly incorrect, misleading, or irrelevant comments. Support for future use was strongest when AI was framed as a supervised or author-controlled tool: 96.4% said they would use AI as an internal review tool before future submissions, 89.3% preferred advance notice that AI would be used in review, and 76.8% favored explicit consent before use.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

GeoPl@ntNet: A Platform for Exploring Essential Biodiversity Variables

This paper describes GeoPl@ntNet, an interactive web application designed to make Essential Biodiversity Variables accessible and understandable to everyone through dynamic maps and fact sheets. Its core purpose is to allow users to explore high-resolution AI-generated maps of species distributions, habitat types, and biodiversity indicators across Europe. These maps, developed through a cascading pipeline involving convolutional neural networks and large language models, provide an intuitive yet information-rich interface to better understand biodiversity, with resolutions as precise as 50x50 meters. The website also enables exploration of specific regions, allowing users to select areas of interest on the map (e.g., urban green spaces, protected areas, or riverbanks) to view local species and their coverage. Additionally, GeoPl@ntNet generates comprehensive reports for selected regions, including insights into the number of protected species, invasive species, and endemic species.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2025

Mapping biodiversity at very-high resolution in Europe

This paper describes a cascading multimodal pipeline for high-resolution biodiversity mapping across Europe, integrating species distribution modeling, biodiversity indicators, and habitat classification. The proposed pipeline first predicts species compositions using a deep-SDM, a multimodal model trained on remote sensing, climate time series, and species occurrence data at 50x50m resolution. These predictions are then used to generate biodiversity indicator maps and classify habitats with Pl@ntBERT, a transformer-based LLM designed for species-to-habitat mapping. With this approach, continental-scale species distribution maps, biodiversity indicator maps, and habitat maps are produced, providing fine-grained ecological insights. Unlike traditional methods, this framework enables joint modeling of interspecies dependencies, bias-aware training with heterogeneous presence-absence data, and large-scale inference from multi-source remote sensing inputs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Fully automatic extraction of morphological traits from the Web: utopia or reality?

Plant morphological traits, their observable characteristics, are fundamental to understand the role played by each species within their ecosystem. However, compiling trait information for even a moderate number of species is a demanding task that may take experts years to accomplish. At the same time, massive amounts of information about species descriptions is available online in the form of text, although the lack of structure makes this source of data impossible to use at scale. To overcome this, we propose to leverage recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and devise a mechanism for gathering and processing information on plant traits in the form of unstructured textual descriptions, without manual curation. We evaluate our approach by automatically replicating three manually created species-trait matrices. Our method managed to find values for over half of all species-trait pairs, with an F1-score of over 75%. Our results suggest that large-scale creation of structured trait databases from unstructured online text is currently feasible thanks to the information extraction capabilities of LLMs, being limited by the availability of textual descriptions covering all the traits of interest.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

GeoPlant: Spatial Plant Species Prediction Dataset

The difficulty of monitoring biodiversity at fine scales and over large areas limits ecological knowledge and conservation efforts. To fill this gap, Species Distribution Models (SDMs) predict species across space from spatially explicit features. Yet, they face the challenge of integrating the rich but heterogeneous data made available over the past decade, notably millions of opportunistic species observations and standardized surveys, as well as multimodal remote sensing data. In light of that, we have designed and developed a new European-scale dataset for SDMs at high spatial resolution (10--50m), including more than 10k species (i.e., most of the European flora). The dataset comprises 5M heterogeneous Presence-Only records and 90k exhaustive Presence-Absence survey records, all accompanied by diverse environmental rasters (e.g., elevation, human footprint, and soil) traditionally used in SDMs. In addition, it provides Sentinel-2 RGB and NIR satellite images with 10 m resolution, a 20-year time series of climatic variables, and satellite time series from the Landsat program. In addition to the data, we provide an openly accessible SDM benchmark (hosted on Kaggle), which has already attracted an active community and a set of strong baselines for single predictor/modality and multimodal approaches. All resources, e.g., the dataset, pre-trained models, and baseline methods (in the form of notebooks), are available on Kaggle, allowing one to start with our dataset literally with two mouse clicks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

The GeoLifeCLEF 2023 Dataset to evaluate plant species distribution models at high spatial resolution across Europe

The difficulty to measure or predict species community composition at fine spatio-temporal resolution and over large spatial scales severely hampers our ability to understand species assemblages and take appropriate conservation measures. Despite the progress in species distribution modeling (SDM) over the past decades, SDM have just begun to integrate high resolution remote sensing data and their predictions are still entailed by many biases due to heterogeneity of the available biodiversity observations, most often opportunistic presence only data. We designed a European scale dataset covering around ten thousand plant species to calibrate and evaluate SDM predictions of species composition in space and time at high spatial resolution (~ten meters), and their spatial transferability. For model training, we extracted and harmonized five million heterogeneous presence-only records from selected GBIF datasets and 6 thousand exhaustive presence-absence surveys both sampled during 2017-2021. We associated species observations to diverse environmental rasters classically used in SDMs, as well as to 10 m resolution RGB and Near-Infra-Red satellite images and 20 years-time series of climatic variables and satellite point values. The evaluation dataset is based on 22 thousand standardized presence-absence surveys separated from the training set with a spatial block hold out procedure. The GeoLifeCLEF 2023 dataset is open access and the first benchmark for researchers aiming to improve the prediction of plant species composition at a very fine spatial grain and at continental scale. It is a space to explore new ways of combining massive and diverse species observations and environmental information at various scales. Innovative AI-based approaches, in particular, should be among the most interesting methods to experiment with on the GeoLifeCLEF 2023 dataset.

q-bio.PE↗