Cross-Regional Marine Ecological Risk Assessment System Integrating Federated Learning
Main Article Content
Abstract
Traditional centralized assessment methods often show bias in global modeling and struggle to balance knowledge sharing with local adaptation when cross-regional data are heterogeneous and non-independent and identically distributed. This problem is common in marine ecological monitoring and is also relevant to distributed electromagnetic sensing networks, where observation standards, sensor density, and local environments vary across regions. To improve the accuracy, consistency, and robustness of cross-regional marine ecological risk assessment, this paper proposes a system incorporating a hierarchical federated learning framework. Each client locally uses a hybrid model integrating physical mechanisms and data-driven capabilities, focusing on phytoplankton-nutrient-dissolved oxygen coupling dynamics. To maintain shared learning consistency, the system applies domain-adaptive regularized aggregation and aligns client hidden-layer distributions on the server, thereby mitigating feature drift. A lightweight personalized calibration layer compensates for regional heterogeneity. Characteristic variables are finally fused into a unified risk scale through uncertainty weighting to produce interpretable results. The method achieves an MSE of 0.483, an MMD of approximately 0.126, and a maximum regional variance of only 0.037, demonstrating stronger cross-regional stability and accuracy than baseline methods while preserving privacy. The system offers quantitative decision support for marine governance and provides a transferable framework for distributed sensor and electromagnetic monitoring applications.
Downloads
Article Details

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
References
S. J. Painting, K. A. Collingridge, D. Durand, A. Gremare, V. Creach, C. Arvanitidis, et al., “Marine monitoring in Europe: is it adequate to address environmental threats and pressures? Ocean Science,” 2020; 16(1): 235-252, doi: 10.5194/os-16-235-2020.
A. Melet, P. Teatini, G. Le Cozannet, C. Jamet, A. Conversi, J. Benveniste, et al., “Earth observations for monitoring marine coastal hazards and their drivers,” Surveys in Geophysics, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1489-1534, 2020, doi: 10.1007/s10712-020-09594-5.
F. Glaviano, R. Esposito, A. Di Cosmo, F. Esposito, L. Gerevini, A. Ria, et al., “Management and sustainable exploitation of marine environments through smart monitoring and automation,” Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 297-312, 2022, doi: 10.3390/jmse10020297.
E. Buonocore, U. Grande, P. P. Franzese, and G. F. Russo, “Trends and evolution in the concept of marine ecosystem services: an overview,” Water, vol. 13, no. 15, pp. 2060-2073, 2021, doi: 10.3390/w13152060.
L. Fallati, L. Saponari, A. Savini, F. Marchese, C. Corselli, and P. Galli, “Multi-Temporal UAV Data and object-based image analysis (OBIA) for estimation of substrate changes in a post-bleaching scenario on a maldivian reef,” Remote Sensing, vol. 12, no. 13, pp. 2093-2116, 2020, doi: 10.3390/rs12132093.
M. I. Adeoba, T. Pandelani, H. Ngwangwa, and T. Masebe, “The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Sustainable Ocean Waste Tracking and Management: A Bibliometric Analysis,” Sustainability, vol. 17, no. 9, pp. 3912-3942, 2025, doi: 10.3390/su17093912.
M. Goodwin, K. T. Halvorsen, L. Jiao, K. M. Knausgård, A. H. Martin, M. Moyano, et al., “Unlocking the potential of deep learning for marine ecology: overview, applications, and outlook,” ICES Journal of Marine Science, vol. 79, no. 2, pp. 319-336, 2022, doi: 10.1093/icesjms/fsab255.
J. Weber, M. Gurtner, A. Lobe, A. Trachte, and A. Kugi, “Combining federated learning and control: A survey,” IET Control Theory & Applications, vol. 18, no. 18, pp. 2503-2523, 2024, doi: 10.1049/cth2.12761.
H. Zhao, F. Ji, Y. Wang, K. Yao, and F. Chen, “Space-air-ground-sea integrated network with federated learning,” Remote Sensing, vol. 16, no. 9, pp. 1640-1658, 2024, doi: 10.3390/rs16091640.
A. Giannopoulos, P. Gkonis, P. Bithas, N. Nomikos, A. Kalafatelis, and P. Trakadas, “Federated learning for maritime environ ments: use cases, experimental results, and open issues,” Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. 1034-1044, 2024, doi: 10.3390/jmse12061034.
I. Achituve, A. Shamsian, A. Navon, G. Chechik, and E. Fetaya, “Personalized federated learning with gaussian processes,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 34, pp. 8392-8406, 2021.
M. Daniels, S. van Vliet, and M. Ackermann, “Changes in interactions over ecological time scales influence single-cell growth dynamics in a metabolically coupled marine microbial community,” The ISME Journal, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 406-416, 2023, doi: 10.1038/s41396-022-01312-w.
T. D. Eddy, J. R. Bernhardt, J. L. Blanchard, W. W. L. Cheung, M. Colleter, H. du Pontavice, et al., “Energy flow through marine ecosystems: confronting transfer efficiency,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 76-86, 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2020.09.006.
S. Temitope Yekeen and A. L. Balogun, “Advances in remote sensing technology, machine learning and deep learning for marine oil spill detection, prediction and vulnerability assessment,” Remote Sensing, vol. 12, no. 20, pp. 3416-3446, 2020, doi: 10.3390/rs12203416.
Manso-Narvarte I, Solabarrieta L, Caballero A,et al.Fishing vessels as met-ocean data collection platforms: data lifecycle from acquisition to sharing[J].Frontiers in Marine Science, 2025, doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1467439.
Q. Chen, Z. Wang, J. Chen, H. Yan, and X. Lin, “Dap-FL: Federated learning flourishes by adaptive tuning and secure aggregation,” IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 1923-1941, 2023, doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2023.3267897.
L. Zhao, J. Jiang, B. Feng, Q. Wang, C. Shen, and Q. Li, “Sear: Secure and efficient aggregation for byzantine-robust federated learning,” IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 3329-3342, 2021, doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2021.3093711.
X. Wang, Z. Liang, A. S. Voundi Koe, Q. Wu, X. Zhang, H. Li, et al., “Secure and efficient parameters aggregation protocol for federated incremental learning and its applications,” International Journal of Intelligent Systems, vol. 37, no. 8, pp. -4487, 2022, doi: 10.1002/int.22727.
Z. Yang, M. Zhou, H. Yu, R. O. Sinnott, and H. Liu, “Efficient and secure federated learning with verifiable weighted average aggregation,” IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 205-222, 2022, doi: 10.1109/TNSE.2022.3206243.
X. H. Ni, Z. L. Chen, H. Li, and X. J. Kong, “Anomaly identification and repair of hydrological telemetry data based on federated learning,” Journal of Zhejiang University of Technology, vol. 51, no. 6, pp. 610-618, 2023.
Z. Qin, J. Ye, J. Meng, B. Lu, and L. Wang, “Privacy-preserving blockchain-based federated learning for marine Internet of Things,” IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 159-173, 2021, doi: 10.1109/TCSS.2021.3100258.
A. T. Nguyen, P. Torr, and S. N. Lim, “Fedsr: A simple and effective domain generalization method for federated learning,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 35, pp. 38831-38843, 2022, doi: 10.52202/068431-2814.
B. Sun, H. Huo, Y. Yang, and B. Bai, “Partialfed: Cross-domain personalized federated learning via partial initialization,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 34, pp. 23309-23320, 2021.
X. Yu, D. Wang, M. J. McKeown, and Z. J. Wang, “Contrastive-enhanced domain generalization with federated learning,” IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 1525-1532, 2023, doi: 10.1109/TAI.2023.3298297.
L. Yang, J. Huang, W. Lin, and J. Cao, “Personalized federated learning on non-IID data via group-based meta-learning,” ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 1-20, 2023, doi: 10.1145/3558005.
W. K. Oestreich, M. F. Czapanskiy, K. Katija, et al., “Collective Science to Inform Global Ocean Protections,” Ecology Letters, vol. 28, no. 8, Art. no. e70168, 2025, doi: 10.1111/ele.70168.
L. Wu, S. Guo, Y. Ding, J. Wang, W. Xu, Y. Zhan, et al., “Re-thinking personalized client collaboration in federated learning,” IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 23, no. 12, pp. 11227-11239, 2024, doi: 10.1109/TMC.2024.3396218.
N. Purba, G. Faid, W. Zheng, et al., “Two centuries of oceanographic data in the Indonesian Seas and surroundings: historical patterns of data availability, gaps, and future challenges,” Earth System Science Data, vol. 17, no. 12, 2025, doi: 10.5194/essd-17-7203-2025.