Human activities and natural phenomena continually transform the Earth’s surface, presenting ongoing challenges to the environment. Therefore, the accurate and timely monitoring and prediction of these alterations are essential for devising effective solutions and mitigating environmental impacts in advance. This study introduces a novel framework, called HCD-Net, for detecting changes using bi-temporal hyperspectral images. HCD-Net is built upon a dual-stream deep feature extraction process, complemented by an attention mechanism. The first stream employs 3D convolution layers and 3D Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks to extract deep features, while the second stream utilizes 2D convolution and 2D SE blocks for the same purpose. The deep features from both streams are then concatenated and processed through dense layers for decision-making. The performance of HCD-Net is evaluated against existing state-of-the-art change detection methods. For this purpose, the bi-temporal Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) hyperspectral dataset was utilized to assess the change detection performance. The findings indicate that HCD-Net achieves superior accuracy and the lowest false alarm rate among the compared methods, with an overall classification accuracy exceeding 96%, and a kappa coefficient greater than 0.9.

Understanding the impacts of the spatial non-stationarity of environmental factors on surface soil moisture (SSM) in different seasons is crucial for effective environmental management. Yet, our knowledge of this phenomenon remains limited. This study introduces an interpretable machine learning framework that combines the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method with two-step clustering to unravel the spatial drivers of SSM across Iran. Due to the limited availability of in situ SSM data, the performance of three global SSM datasets—SMAP, MERRA-2, and CFSv2—from 2015 to 2023 was evaluated using agrometeorological stations. SMAP outperformed the others, showing the highest median correlation and the lowest Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). Using SMAP, we estimated SSM across 609 catchments employing the Random Forest (RF) algorithm. The RF model yielded R² values of 0.89, 0.83, 0.70, and 0.75 for winter, spring, summer, and autumn, respectively, with corresponding RMSE values of 0.076, 0.081, 0.098, and 0.061 m³/m³. SHAP analysis revealed that climatic factors primarily drive SSM in winter and autumn, while vegetation and soil characteristics are more influential in spring and summer. The clustering results showed that Iran’s catchments can be grouped into five categories based on the SHAP method coefficients, highlighting regional differences in SSM controls.