首个用于寒带森林气候适应管理的多目标强化学习环境,助力碳汇与冻土保护协同优化。
BoreaRL: A Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Environment for Climate-Adaptive Boreal Forest Management
- 构建物理驱动的多目标强化学习环境,模拟能量、碳和水通量耦合过程。
- 发现冻土保护目标的学习难度远高于碳汇目标,现有方法难以有效优化。
- 开源工具适合气候智能型森林管理研究者及多目标强化学习算法开发者。
寒带森林储存了陆地30-40%的碳,其中大量碳存在于对气候敏感的冻土土壤中,其管理对气候减缓至关重要。然而,同时优化碳汇与冻土保护面临复杂权衡,现有工具难以应对。本文提出BoreaRL,首个面向气候适应性寒带森林管理的多目标强化学习环境,包含一个物理基础的耦合能量、碳和水通量模拟器。该环境支持两种训练范式:针对特定地点的受控研究模式与应对环境随机性的泛化模式。通过评估多目标强化学习算法,我们发现学习难度存在根本不对称:碳目标显著更易优化,而以冻土保护为核心的策略在两种范式下均表现极差,学习进展微弱。在泛化设置中,基于梯度下降的偏好条件方法失效,而一种简单的站点选择策略因战略性选取训练回合反而表现更优。对学习策略的分析揭示出不同管理理念:碳优先策略倾向高密度针叶林,而高效多目标策略则通过平衡物种组成与密度,在保护冻土的同时维持碳增益。结果表明,当前多目标强化学习方法在实现稳健气候适应性森林管理方面仍具挑战,确立了BoreaRL作为该领域的重要基准。我们已开源BoreaRL,以推动气候应用中多目标强化学习的研究。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Boreal forests store 30-40\% of terrestrial carbon, much in climate-vulnerable permafrost soils, making their management critical for climate mitigation. However, optimizing forest management for both carbon sequestration and permafrost preservation presents complex trade-offs that current tools cannot adequately address. We introduce BoreaRL, the first multi-objective reinforcement learning environment for climate-adaptive boreal forest management, featuring a physically-grounded simulator of coupled energy, carbon, and water fluxes. BoreaRL supports two training paradigms: site-specific mode for controlled studies and generalist mode for learning robust policies under environmental stochasticity. Through evaluation of multi-objective RL algorithms, we reveal a fundamental asymmetry in learning difficulty: carbon objectives are significantly easier to optimize than thaw (permafrost preservation) objectives, with thaw-focused policies showing minimal learning progress across both paradigms. In generalist settings, standard gradient-descent based preference-conditioned approaches fail, while a naive site selection approach achieves superior performance by strategically selecting training episodes. Analysis of learned strategies reveals distinct management philosophies, where carbon-focused policies favor aggressive high-density coniferous stands, while effective multi-objective policies balance species composition and density to protect permafrost while maintaining carbon gains. Our results demonstrate that robust climate-adaptive forest management remains challenging for current MORL methods, establishing BoreaRL as a valuable benchmark for developing more effective approaches. We open-source BoreaRL to accelerate research in multi-objective RL for climate applications.
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