# From Images to Insights: Explainable Biodiversity Monitoring with Plain Language Habitat Explanations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10559 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10559/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [DAGs with NO TEARS: Continuous Optimization for Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01422/) (2018)
- [DAG-GNN: DAG Structure Learning with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10098/) (2019)
- [Gradient-Based Neural DAG Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02226/) (2019)
- [BioCLIP: A Vision Foundation Model for the Tree of Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18803/) (2023)
- [DoWhy: An End-to-End Library for Causal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04216/) (2020)
- [BioCLIP 2: Emergent Properties from Scaling Hierarchical Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23883/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Explaining why the species lives at a particular location is important for understanding ecological systems and conserving biodiversity. However, existing ecological workflows are fragmented and often inaccessible to non-specialists. We propose an end-to-end visual-to-causal framework that transforms a species image into interpretable causal insights about its habitat preference. The system integrates species recognition, global occurrence retrieval, pseudo-absence sampling, and climate data extraction. We then discover causal structures among environmental features and estimate their influence on species occurrence using modern causal inference methods. Finally, we generate statistically grounded, human-readable causal explanations from structured templates and large language models. We demonstrate the framework on a bee and a flower species and report early results as part of an ongoing project, showing the potential of the multimodal AI assistant backed up by a recommended ecological modeling practice for describing species habitat in human-understandable language. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Yutong-Zhou-cv/BioX.