cathv/batis_benchmark_2025

license: cc-by-nc-4.0

BATIS: Benchmarking Bayesian Approaches for Improving Species Distribution Models

This repository contains the dataset used in experiments shown in BATIS: Benchmarking Bayesian Approaches for Improving Species Distribution Models (preprint). To download the dataset, you can use the load_dataset function from HuggingFace. For example :

from datasets import load_dataset

# Training Split for Kenya
training_kenya = load_dataset("cathv/batis_benchmark_2025", name="Kenya", split="train")

# Validation Split for South Africa
validation_south_africa = load_dataset("cathv/batis_benchmark_2025", name="South_Africa", split="val")

# Test Split for USA-Summer
test_usa_summer = load_dataset("cathv/batis_benchmark_2025", name="USA_Summer", split="test")

The code to reproduce the experiments presented in the paper is available in our GitHub repository. Please note that the checklists data is NOT AVAILABLE in this current repository, in order to comply with the eBird Data Access Terms of Use . If you are interested in downloading the checklists data, please formulate a request for access to the eBird team.

⚠️ !!! ERRATUM IN THE MAIN PAPER !!! ⚠️

We would like to apologize to the reviewers for a typo in Table 1 of the main paper. The table incorrectly suggests that hundreds of thousands of species can be observed in the United States during summer, and nearly 50,000 in winter. While many birders would surely dream of such an extraordinary high avian biodiversity, these numbers are clearly far from the reality. The values intended for the number_of_hotspots column were unfortunately placed in the number_of_species column. The first table of the Appendix reports the appropriate numbers, but we also include it here to avoid any confusion :

Region	Date Range	Number of Checklists	Number of Hotspots	Number of Species	Species List
Kenya (KE)	2010-01-01 to 2023-12-31	44,852	8,551	1,054	Avibase
South Africa (ZA)	2018-01-01 to 2024-06-17	498,867	6,643	755	BirdLife
USA-Winter (US-W)	2022-12-01 to 2023-01-31	3,673,742	45,882	670	ABA 1-2
USA-Summer (US-S)	2022-06-01 to 2022-07-31	3,920,846	98,443	670	ABA 1-2

Dataset Configurations and Splits

The dataset contains the following four configurations :

• Kenya : Containing the data used to train our models for predicting bird species distribution in Kenya.
• South Africa : Containing the data used to train our models for predicting bird species distribution in South Africa.
• USA-Winter : Containing the data used to train our models for predicting bird species distribution in the United States of America during the winter season.
• USA-Summer : Containing the data used to train our models for predicting bird species distribution in the United States of America during the summer season.

Each subset can be further divided into train, test and split. These splits are the same as the one we used in our paper, and were generated by following the pre-processing pipeline described in our paper, which can be easily reproduced by re-using our code.

Dataset Structure

/batis_benchmark_2025/
    Kenya/
        images.tar.gz
        environmental.tar.gz
        targets.tar.gz
        train_filtered.csv
        test_filtered.csv
        valid_filtered.csv
    South_Africa/
        images.tar.gz
        environmental.tar.gz
        targets.tar.gz
        train_filtered.csv
        test_filtered.csv
        valid_filtered.csv
    USA_Winter/
        images/
          images_{aa}
          ...
          images_{ad}
          
        environmental.tar.gz
        targets.tar.gz
        train_filtered.csv
        test_filtered.csv
        valid_filtered.csv
    USA_Summer/
        images/
            images_{aa}
            ...
            images_{af}
        images.tar.gz
        environmental.tar.gz
        targets.tar.gz
        train_filtered.csv
        test_filtered.csv
        valid_filtered.csv
    Species_ID/
        species_list_kenya.csv
        species_list_south_africa.csv
        species_list_usa.csv

The files train_filtered.csv, test_filtered.csv and valid_filtered.csv are containing the informations one can see from the Dataset Viewer. The archives targets, images, environmental are respectively containing the target vectors (i.e., the estimated ground truth encounter rate probability). The Species_ID/ folder contains the species list files for each subset.

Data Fields

• hotspot_id : The unique ID associated with a given hotspot. The hotspot_idvalue can be used to upload date coming from either targets, environmental or variance, as they are all formulated as

/batis_benchmark_2025/
    images/
        {hotspot_id_1}.tar.gz
        ...
        {hotspot_id_n}.tar.gz
    environmental/
        {hotspot_id_1}.tar.gz
        ...
        {hotspot_id_1}.tar.gz
    targets/
        {hotspot_id_1}.tar.gz
        ...
        {hotspot_id_1}.tar.gz

• lon : Longitude coordinate of the hotspot
• latitude : Latitude coordinate of the hotspot
• num_complete_checklists : Number of complete checklists collected in that hotspot
• bio_1 to bio_19: Environmental covariates values associated with that hotspot, extracted from the WorldClim model. For more details on each of these variables, please refer to Table 5 of the appendix.
• split : The split associated with that hotspot (either train, valid or test)

Authors

• Curated by: Catherine Villeneuve, Mélisande Teng, Benjamin Akera, David Rolnick
• Language: English
• Repository: https://huggingface.co/datasets/cathv/batis_benchmark_2025
• Paper: IN REVIEW

Licenses

The BATIS Benchmark is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.

The use of our dataset should also comply with the following:

• eBird Terms of Use
• eBird API Terms of Use
• eBird Data Access Terms of Use