Biogeochemistry-Informed Neural Network (BINN v1.0) for improving accuracy of model prediction and scientific understanding of soil organic carbon storage

作者：Haodi Xu, Joshua Fan, Feng Tao, Lifen Jiang, Fengqi You, Benjamin Houlton, Ying Sun, Carla P. Gomes, Yiqi Luo · 发表于：Geoscientific model development · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.5194/gmd-19-6777-2026 · 研究领域：Soil Geostatistics and Mapping、Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics、Hydrology and Watershed Management Studies

Abstract. The increasing availability of large-scale observational data and the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) provide unprecedented opportunities to enhance our understanding of the global carbon cycle and other biogeochemical processes. However, retrieving mechanistic knowledge from these large-scale data remains a challenge. Here, we develop a Biogeochemistry-Informed Neural Network (BINN) that seamlessly integrates a vectorized process-based soil carbon cycle model (i.e., Community Land Model version 5, CLM5) into a neural network (NN) structure to examine mechanisms governing soil organic carbon (SOC) storage from big data. BINN demonstrates high accuracy in retrieving biogeochemical parameter values from synthetic data in a parameter recovery experiment. Furthermore, by incorporating Monte Carlo (MC) dropout to generate posterior distributions, we demonstrate that BINN can effectively quantify uncertainty in estimated parameters. We use BINN to predict six major processes (or components in process-based models) regulating the soil carbon cycle from 25 925 observed SOC profiles across the contiguous US and compare them with the same processes previously retrieved by a Bayesian inference-based PROcess-guided deep learning and DAta-driven modeling (PRODA) approach. The good agreement between the spatial patterns retrieved by BINN and PRODA (average correlation coefficient = 0.86) suggests that BINN's ability of capturing mechanistic knowledge is consiste...