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:2609.28194v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Old-growth forests develop over centuries under minimal anthropogenic disturbance, producing structurally complex and biodiverse stands. In Europe, pro...
By Thomas Ratsakatika (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK), Mihai Zotta (Fundatia Conservation Carpathia, Brasov, Romania), Srinivasan Keshav (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK), Emily R. Lines (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK)
The study evaluates recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for classifying tree species from Sentinel‑2 time‑series data, focusing on distinguishing pure from mixed Norway spruce pixels. RNNs outperform Random Forest and XGBoost, achieving a Macro‑F1 of 0.851. Integrated Gradients analysis identifies key spectral‑temporal patterns—especially after day of year 125 and in band B11—that drive class separation, offering insights into phenological periods useful for mapping mixed forest structures.
By Maximilian Kirsch, Christine Preisach
Over the past decade, interest in applying machine learning (ML) to automate forest monitoring has grown significantly. However, existing training datasets are predominantly drawn from North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, leaving a critical gap in African forestry data.
Accurate vegetation-community classification is essential for ecological monitoring, habitat assessment, and evidence-based environmental management in heterogeneous landscapes. Existing studies often rely on standalone tree ensembles or generic neural networks, although fine-grained ecological classes frequently exhibit overlapping spectral, topographic, and structural characteristics.
The paper introduces MS-ALS-SPECIES, an open multispectral airborne laser scanning dataset designed for tree species classification. It contains 6,326 segment-level point clouds of individual trees from nine species in southern Finland, collected with two multispectral laser systems—HeliALS and Optech Titan—providing high point densities. The authors also present a crowdsourcing application for efficient field reference data collection and demonstrate the dataset’s utility through new species‑classification analyses building on prior work.
By Matti Hyypp\"a, Klaara Salolahti, Eric Hyypp\"a, Xiaowei Yu, Josef Taher, Leena Matikainen, Matti Lehtom\"aki, Paula Litkey, Teemu Hakala, Harri Kaartinen, Juha Hyypp\"a, Antero Kukko
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
The study evaluates 13 Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) for estimating above‑ground biomass (AGB) from satellite imagery, comparing them to a fully supervised state‑of‑the‑art baseline trained on the AGBD dataset. Most GFMs perform worse than the baseline, but TESSERA and AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) features combined with specific prediction heads achieve superior results, with the best model attaining an RMSE of 50.79 Mg/ha. This AEF‑based model also generalizes better to unseen regions, reduces RMSE by up to 25% in excluded areas, and matches the ESA CCI biomass product when trained on limited regional labels.
By Ghjulia Sialelli, Linus Scheibenreif, Jan Dirk Wegner, Konrad Schindler
arXiv:2606. 32023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forest attributes are essential for national-scale resource monitoring.
By Emilie Vautier, Cl\'ement Mallet, C\'edric Vega
arXiv:2512.18128v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: High-resolution mapping of canopy height is essential for forest management and biodiversity monitoring. Although recent studies have led to the ad...
By Thomas Boudras, Martin Schwartz, Rasmus Fensholt, Martin Brandt, Ibrahim Fayad, Jean-Pierre Wigneron, Gabriel Belouze, Fajwel Fogel, Philippe Ciais
The study evaluates the use of frozen geospatial foundation embeddings (AlphaEarth) for mapping cultivated versus non‑cultivated land in Maine. Using 192 spatially separated patches and USDA Cropland Data Layer labels, a lightweight classifier achieved 93.7% overall accuracy without fine‑tuning, and a nearest‑class‑centroid rule reached 90.2%. A balanced sample of 60,000 labeled pixels was nearly as effective as the full 8.6 million‑pixel pool, and classifiers trained in one year remained accurate across 2018‑2023. In a blind human validation of 385 points, the AlphaEarth‑plus‑random‑forest map matched 95.3% of the consensus, outperforming the CDL reference (91.7%).
By Mohammad Ammar Mughees, Giovanni Montefoschi, Zhongxin Chen, Maria Antonia Brovelli
arXiv:2607. 24160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate vegetation-community classification is essential for ecological monitoring, habitat assessment, and evidence-based environmental management in heterogeneous landscapes.
By Dristi Datta, Md Khalid Hasan Sakib, Manoranjan Paul