arXiv AI

PhenoEmbed: Self-Supervised Multispectral UAV Time-Series Embeddings for Individual Tree Crown Phenology

arXiv:2607. 10231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tree crowns are a challenging target for resilient AI because they are not static objects: their spectral response, internal texture, translucency, and apparent boundaries change substantially across the growing season.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

SilvaScenes: Tree Detection and Species Classification from Under-Canopy Images in Natural Forests

arXiv:2510. 09458v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interest in forestry automation is growing alongside rapid advances in deep learning.

By David-Alexandre Duclos, William Guimont-Martin, Gabriel Jeanson, Arthur Larochelle-Tremblay, Martine Lapointe, Th\'eo Defosse, Fr\'ed\'eric Moore, Philippe Nolet, Fran\c{c}ois Pomerleau, Philippe Gigu\`ere
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Tree species mapping in Denmark: A comparison of spectral-temporal features with geospatial foundation model embeddings

The study maps tree species across Denmark using National Forest Inventory plots and Earth Observation data, comparing manually engineered spectral‑temporal features (STF) with embeddings from foundation models TESSERA and AlphaEarth. Random forest, XGBoost, and MLP classifiers were evaluated, with the STF‑based MLP achieving the highest macro F1 scores (0.843 for pure stands, 0.653 for mixed stands). The best model was applied nationally to produce a 10 m resolution tree species map, achieving 79.9% area‑adjusted accuracy and released as an open‑access resource.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

Tree species mapping in Denmark: A comparison of spectral-temporal features with geospatial foundation model embeddings

The study maps tree species across Denmark using National Forest Inventory plots and Earth Observation data, comparing manually engineered spectral‑temporal features (STF) from Sentinel‑1 and Sentinel‑2 with embeddings from the foundation models TESSERA and AlphaEarth. Random forest, XGBoost, and MLP classifiers were evaluated, with the STF‑based MLP achieving the highest macro F1 scores for pure and mixed stands. The best model was applied nationally to produce a 10 m resolution tree species map, achieving 79.9% area‑adjusted accuracy and released as an open‑access product.

By Alkiviadis Koukos, Spyros Kondylatos, Thomas Nord-Larsen, Lotte Nyborg, Christian T{\o}ttrup, Kenneth Grogan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Rapid Loss of the Sierra Nevada's Largest Trees Driven by Fire

A deep learning model (U‑Net‑ID) mapped 6.5 million large trees (crown area ≥ 100 m²) across 78.7 % of the Sierra Nevada Floristic Province using sub‑meter aerial imagery from 2020. The spatial distribution of these trees correlated with elevation, temperature, and precipitation. From 2020 to 2025, Sentinel‑2 time series and BFAST breakpoint analysis revealed that wildfires were the dominant driver of large‑tree mortality, killing 10 % of all large trees, especially during the extreme 2020‑2021 fire seasons.

By Fabien H. Wagner, Dan J. Dixon, Christopher W. Woodall, Mayumi C. M. Hirye, Felipe Saad, Griffin Carter, Ricardo Dalagnol, Lorena Alves, Cynthia Creze, Stephen C. Hagen, Zhihua Liu, Christopher Mihiar, Adugna Mullissa, Le Bienfaiteur Sagang Takougoum, Bryan Shaddy, Yan Yang, Dafeng Zhang, Sassan Saatchi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AgroBench: A Reproducible Multimodal Benchmark for Weakly Supervised Crop Yield Learning from County Statistics and Pixel Observations

AgroBench is a reproducible benchmark that converts U.S. county-level crop yield statistics into weakly supervised pixel‑level crop time series. The data generation pipeline fuses USDA yield data with land cover masks, Sentinel‑2 and Sentinel‑1 imagery, climatic variables, and terrain information to produce multimodal sequences for individual crop pixels across the growing season. The benchmark includes over 13 million observations from 788,654 crop pixels, covering 5,107 county‑year combinations for five major U.S. crops from 2017 to 2024, and establishes a Leave‑One‑Year‑Out evaluation protocol with baseline machine learning results.

By Udaiveer Singh, Rajiv Ranjan, Shashank Tamaskar, Dharmendra Saraswat
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

Self-Supervised Tree-level Biomass Estimation in Urban Environments From Airborne LiDAR and Optical Observations

arXiv:2606. 26194v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban tree biomass remains less spatially explicitly quantified than biomass in managed forests because many estimates rely on inventories or coarse products that cannot resolve individual crowns or fine-scale heterogeneity.

By Jose Bermudez (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), Zilong Zhong (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), Dominic Cyr (, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Camile Sothe (Planet Labs PBC, San Francisco, California, USA), Alemu Gonsamo (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada)
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Detection of Christmas tree plantations from high-resolution aerial imagery. A case study in the French Morvan

The study presents a new approach to detect Christmas tree plantations in high‑resolution aerial imagery, treating the task as a rare‑target semantic segmentation problem. It introduces a Hard Negative Mining strategy that significantly improves precision‑recall performance, achieving an IoU of 0.733 and an F1‑score of 0.846 on a 2020 test set. Temporal transfer experiments demonstrate the model’s ability to generalize across years, while large‑scale validation highlights the challenge posed by the plantations’ small spatial footprint.

By Francesca Razzano, Emanuele Dalsasso, Adrien Baysse-Lain\'e, Silvia Liberata Ullo, Gilda Schirinzi, Jocelyn Chanussot
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Toward a foundation model for forest point clouds

arXiv:2609.24787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forest inventories increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) models to derive forest attributes from large-scale 3D point clouds. Current model...

By Yuanwen Yue, Stefano Puliti, Damien Robert, Atakan Topalo\u{g}lu, Binbin Xiang, Maciej Wielgosz, Jan Dirk Wegner, Rasmus Astrup, Christian Rupprecht, Konrad Schindler
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Bringing SAM to new heights: Leveraging elevation data for tree crown segmentation from drone imagery

The paper introduces BalSAM, a model that combines the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with Digital Surface Model (DSM) elevation data to improve tree crown instance segmentation from high‑resolution drone imagery. Experiments across boreal plantations, temperate forests, and tropical forests show that while off‑the‑shelf SAM does not beat a custom Mask R-CNN, fine‑tuning SAM end‑to‑end and incorporating DSM information yield promising results, especially for plantation sites.

By M\'elisande Teng, Arthur Ouaknine, Etienne Lalibert\'e, Yoshua Bengio, David Rolnick, Hugo Larochelle