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arXiv Computer Vision

FORMSpoT: Revealing Fine-Scale Forest Disturbances from Nation-Wide 1.5 m Forest Canopy Height Time Series

FORMSpoT presents a decade-long, 1.5 m resolution mapping of forest canopy height across France using SPOT‑6/7 data and a transformer model trained on airborne laser scanning. The derived FORMSpoT‑Δ disturbance polygons reveal that most French forest disturbances are small (<0.1 ha), a scale largely missed by coarser Sentinel‑1/2 and Landsat products, and that the method achieves high detection accuracy (F1 > 0.8) for events larger than 100 m² while still capturing finer events. Nationally, the approach distinguishes contrasting disturbance regimes—clear‑cut dominated in maritime pine plantations versus diffuse events in mountain forests—and tracks temporal dynamics such as the 2017‑2022 bark beetle crisis.

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

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