Time Series Forecasting of Environmental Dynamics in Urban Ecotourism Forest Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Time Series Forecasting of Environmental Dynamics in urban forests is quite challenging, unless new approaches such as deep learning and remote sensing are employed. Deep learning-based time series algorithms offer robust scientific capabilities for forecasting and assessing sustainability trends using sequential data. Among these, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) have gained widespread adoption across various predictive modeling domains. In the present research, these algorithms are employed to analyze urban forest raster data derived from the Srengseng Ecotourism Forest, located in West Jakarta, Indonesia. The present study focuses on predicting the temporal patterns of key spatial indicators: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Land Surface Temperature (LST), and Forest Cover Density (FCD) in the Srengseng urban ecotourism forest area, spanning the years 2014 to 2024, through the application of LSTM, GRU, and BiLSTM deep learning architectures. The methodology used in this study is a combined approach involving remote sensing and deep learning. Spatial data were acquired through the delineation of a high-precision polygon of Srengseng Urban Forest using Google Earth Pro and Google Earth Engine (GEE). GeoTIFF datasets of NDVI, LST, and FCD for the years 2014–2024 were processed using Python-based modeling scripts. Model performance was evaluated through a comparative analysis of LSTM, GRU, and BiLSTM in predicting temporal trends in these ecological indicators. The results of this study show that the Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) consistently demonstrated superior performance to predict all the data spatially, with scores of 0.94 for NDVI, 0.90 for FCD, and 0.85 for LST. Followed by LSTM that predicts NDVI (0.87), FCD (0.89), LST (0.83), as well as GRU, which can estimate spatial data NDVI (0.86), FCD (0.89), and LST (0.85). These results outperformed the predictive accuracy of both the standard LSTM and GRU models.