Evaluating the method reproducibility of deep learning models in biodiversity research

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing biodiversity research by enabling advanced data analysis, species identification, and habitats monitoring, thereby enhancing conservation efforts. Ensuring reproducibility in AI-driven biodiversity research is crucial for fostering transparency, verifying results, and promoting the credibility of ecological findings. This study investigates the reproducibility of deep learning (DL) methods within the biodiversity research. We design a methodology for evaluating the reproducibility of biodiversity-related publications that employ DL techniques across three stages. We define ten variables essential for method reproducibility, divided into four categories: resource requirements, methodological information, uncontrolled randomness, and statistical considerations. These categories subsequently serve as the basis for defining different levels of reproducibility. We manually extract the availability of these variables from a curated dataset comprising 100 publications identified using the keywords provided by biodiversity experts. Our study shows that a dataset is shared in 50% of the publications; however, a significant number of the publications lack comprehensive information on deep learning methods, including details regarding randomness.