Data Coverage Issues in High-Latitude Ecosystem Respiration Modeling: A Comparative Study of Two Frameworks

Modeling high-latitude ecosystem respiration (Rs) faces challenges of insufficient data coverage, including sparse spatial distribution and seasonal temporal gaps. The Rs_coverage project compares two machine learning frameworks—the Annual Coverage Model (ACM) and the Hybrid Dataset Model (HDM)—to explore the trade-off between data quality and quantity, providing valuable insights for solving problems in this field.

High-latitude regions play a key role in the global carbon cycle, but factors like extreme climates and inconvenient transportation lead to sparse observation sites and difficult maintenance. Data coverage has issues of uneven spatial distribution and seasonal temporal gaps, and the missing data is non-random, which easily introduces systematic biases into model training.

The project designs two comparative frameworks: ACM uses only complete annual observation data for training, while HDM incorporates seasonally incomplete data; feature engineering integrates multi-source environmental data such as meteorology, soil, and vegetation; the model uses ensemble learning methods (e.g., random forests), and controlled variables are used to ensure that performance differences stem from data coverage.

HDM may have better spatial generalization ability due to incorporating more site data; ACM has advantages in time series continuity and reliability; the two are suitable for different scenarios—HDM is suitable for spatial interpolation and regional-scale estimation, while ACM is suitable for time trend analysis and long-term dynamic monitoring.

We need to balance data quality and quantity; missing data processing needs to be refined to avoid blindly deleting or including low-quality data; model validation needs to be rigorous, considering biases caused by spatial autocorrelation and other factors.

Develop imputation methods for seasonally missing data; explore transfer learning techniques to improve high-latitude model performance; optimize data collection strategies and use active learning to maximize the information value of data.

The project emphasizes the importance of data quality and strategies, provides a research paradigm of comparative experiments, offers references for researchers in ecological modeling and data-scarce fields, and reminds that advanced algorithms cannot make up for fundamental data defects—clever data strategy design can better improve application effects.