A Study on Deep Learning-Based Predictive Modeling of Vegetation Dynamics in Kazakhstan through the Integration of CNNs, RNNs, and Satellite Imagery for Ecological Monitoring

Authors

  • Aizhan Altaibek International Information Technology University, Almaty, 05000, Kazakhstan | Institute of Ionosphere, Almaty, 050020, Kazakhstan
  • Marat Nurtas International Information Technology University, Almaty, 05000, Kazakhstan | Institute of Ionosphere, Almaty, 050020, Kazakhstan
  • Serik Nurakynov Institute of Ionosphere, Almaty, 050020, Kazakhstan
  • Aigerim Kaken Institute of Ionosphere, Almaty, 050020, Kazakhstan
Volume: 15 | Issue: 4 | Pages: 24705-24714 | August 2025 | https://doi.org/10.48084/etasr.11188

Abstract

The present study focused on applying deep learning methods to analyze the dynamics of vegetation in Kazakhstan's ecosystem. Satellite-based indices, such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) were utilized to develop predictive models assessing the effects of environmental parameters on vegetation health. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) were employed for spatial feature extraction along with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for capturing temporal dependencies. Initially, the ResNet-50 model was deployed with the results revealing a poor correlation with the actual vegetation patterns. Extensive preprocessing and optimization methods, such as batch normalization and gradient clipping, were applied, and the findings demonstrated a significant improvement in predictive precision, enabling accurate forecasts of vegetation changes. This work highlighted the potential of combining advanced technology with ecological research to develop solutions for managing climate impacts.

Keywords:

vegetation dynamics, DL, NDVI, EVI, CNNs, RNNs, climate change, Kazakhstan

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

"The Fifth National Report on Progress in Implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity," Ministry of Environemtnal and Water Resources of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 2014.

"Wildlife of Kazakhstan – Iconic Heritage of Future Generations." UNDP Kazakhstan.

P. Micklin, "The Aral Sea Disaster," Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, vol. 35, pp. 47–72, May 2007. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.earth.35.031306.140120

S. L. O’Hara, G. F. Wiggs, B. Mamedov, G. Davidson, and R. B. Hubbard, "Exposure to airborne dust contaminated with pesticide in the Aral Sea region," The Lancet, vol. 355, no. 9204, pp. 627–628, Feb. 2000. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(99)04753-4

"2022 Tied for Fifth Warmest Year on Record," NASA Earth Observatory, 2022.

M. Nurtas, Z. Zhantaev, and A. Altaibek, "Earthquake time-series forecast in Kazakhstan territory: Forecasting accuracy with SARIMAX," Procedia Computer Science, vol. 231, pp. 353–358, Jan. 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2023.12.216

A. Altaibek, I. Tokhtakhunov, M. Nurtas, D. Kozhamzharova, and M. Aitimov, "The Efficacy of Autoencoders in the Utilization of Tabular Data for Classification Tasks," Procedia Computer Science, vol. 238, pp. 492–502, Jan. 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2024.06.052

A. Kairanbayeva et al., "Predictive System for Road Condition Monitoring Based on Open Climate and Remote Sensing Data – A Case Study with Mountain Roads," Engineered Science, vol. 28, no. 2, Jan. 2024, Art. no. 1081.

G. Esen, A. Altaibek, J. Amankulov, B. Matkerim, and M. Nurtas, Enhancing Breast Cancer Detection with Dimensionality Reduction Techniques: A Study Using PCA and LDA on Wisconsin Breast Cancer Data," Procedia Computer Science, vol. 251, pp. 414–421, Jan. 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2024.11.128

K. Didan, A. B. Munoz, R. Solano, and A. Huete, "MODIS Vegetation Index User’s Guide (MOD13 Series)." Vegetation Index and Phenology Lab, Jun. 2015.

C. J. Tucker, J. R. G. Townshend, and T. E. Goff, "African Land-Cover Classification Using Satellite Data," Science, vol. 227, no. 4685, pp. 369–375, Jan. 1985. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.227.4685.369

H. J. Geist and E. F. Lambin, "Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving Forces of Tropical Deforestation: Tropical forests are disappearing as the result of many pressures, both local and regional, acting in various combinations in different geographical locations," BioScience, vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 143–150, Feb. 2002. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2002)052[0143:PCAUDF]2.0.CO;2

N. Pettorelli, J. O. Vik, A. Mysterud, J.-M. Gaillard, C. J. Tucker, and N. C. Stenseth, "Using the satellite-derived NDVI to assess ecological responses to environmental change," Trends in Ecology & Evolution, vol. 20, no. 9, pp. 503–510, Sep. 2005. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2005.05.011

C. J. Tucker, C. Vanpraet, E. Boerwinkel, and A. Gaston, "Satellite remote sensing of total dry matter production in the Senegalese Sahel," Remote Sensing of Environment, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 461–474, Dec. 1983. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0034-4257(83)90053-6

E. H. Hegazi, A. A. Samak, L. Yang, R. Huang, and J. Huang, "Prediction of Soil Moisture Content from Sentinel-2 Images Using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)," Agronomy, vol. 13, no. 3, Mar. 2023, Art. no. 656. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy13030656

R. F. Sage, "Global change biology: A primer," Global Change Biology, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 3–30, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14893

F. Baret et al., "VALERI: a network of sites and a methodology for the validation of medium spatial resolution land satellite products," Remote Sensing of Environment, vol. 76, no. 3, pp. 36–39, 2005.

H. Xu, Y. Wang, H. Guan, T. Shi, and X. Hu, "Detecting Ecological Changes with a Remote Sensing Based Ecological Index (RSEI) Produced Time Series and Change Vector Analysis," Remote Sensing, vol. 11, no. 20, Jan. 2019, Art. no. 2345. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11202345

A. Altaibek, M. Nurtas, Z. Zhantayev, B. Zhumabayev, and A. Kumarkhanova, "Classifying Seismic Events Linked to Solar Activity: A Retrospective LSTM Approach Using Proton Density," Atmosphere, vol. 15, no. 11, Nov. 2024, Art. no. 1290. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos15111290

M. Pritt and G. Chern, "Satellite Image Classification with Deep Learning," in 2017 IEEE Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition Workshop (AIPR), Washington, DC, USA, Oct. 2017, pp. 1–7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/AIPR.2017.8457969

A. A. A. Mohammed, "Improving Intrusion Detecction Systems by using Deep Learning Methods on Time Series Data," Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Research, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 19267–19272, Feb. 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48084/etasr.9417

Z. Ao, Y. Sun, and Q. Xin, "Constructing 10-m NDVI Time Series From Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2 Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks," IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, vol. 18, no. 8, pp. 1461–1465, Aug. 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/LGRS.2020.3003322

A. Abbas, U. Maqsood, S. U. Rehman, K. Mahmood, T. AlSaedi, and M. Kundi, "An Artificial Intelligence Framework for Disease Detection in Potato Plants," Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Research, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 12628–12635, Feb. 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48084/etasr.6456

Y. Chen, Q. Cheng, Y. Cheng, H. Yang, and H. Yu, "Applications of Recurrent Neural Networks in Environmental Factor Forecasting: A Review," Neural Computation, vol. 30, no. 11, pp. 2855–2881, Nov. 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/neco_a_01134

C. Xiong et al., "Improved global 250 m 8-day NDVI and EVI products from 2000–2021 using the LSTM model," Scientific Data, vol. 10, no. 1, Nov. 2023, Art. no. 800. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02695-x

Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and G. Hinton, "Deep learning," Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, pp. 436–444, May 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539

L. P. Osco et al., "A review on deep learning in UAV remote sensing," International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, vol. 102, Oct. 2021, Art. no. 102456. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2021.102456

S. Ruder, "An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms." arXiv, Jun. 15, 2017.

M. D. Zeiler and R. Fergus, "Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks," in 13th European Conference, Zurich, Switzerland, 2014, pp. 818–833. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10590-1_53

K. Simonyan and A. Zisserman, "Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition." in 3rd International Conference for Learning Representations, San Diego, CA, USA, 2015.

D. P. Kingma and J. Ba, "Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization," in 3rd International Conference for Learning Representations, San Diego, CA, USA, 2015.

S. Ioffe and C. Szegedy, "Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift," in Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning, Lille, France, Jul. 2015, pp. 448–456.

I. Loshchilov and F. Hutter, "SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts," in 5th International Conference on Learning Representations, Toulon, France, 2017.

R. Pascanu, T. Mikolov, and Y. Bengio, "On the difficulty of training recurrent neural networks," in 30th International Conference on Machine Learning, Atlanta, GA, USA, May 2013, pp. 1310–1318.

S. Mascarenhas and M. Agarwal, "A comparison between VGG16, VGG19 and ResNet50 architecture frameworks for Image Classification," in 2021 International Conference on Disruptive Technologies for Multi-Disciplinary Research and Applications (CENTCON), Bengaluru, India, Aug. 2021, vol. 1, pp. 96–99. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CENTCON52345.2021.9687944

K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition," in IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2016, pp. 770–778. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.90

Downloads

How to Cite

[1]
A. Altaibek, M. Nurtas, S. Nurakynov, and A. Kaken, “A Study on Deep Learning-Based Predictive Modeling of Vegetation Dynamics in Kazakhstan through the Integration of CNNs, RNNs, and Satellite Imagery for Ecological Monitoring”, Eng. Technol. Appl. Sci. Res., vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 24705–24714, Aug. 2025.

Metrics

Abstract Views: 492
PDF Downloads: 399

Metrics Information