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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Foundation-Model Earth Representations Enable Regional-Scale Forest Aboveground Biomass Monitoring Across the Northeastern United States

arXiv:2607. 27217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is a critical indicator of ecosystem productivity and terrestrial carbon storage, yet regional carbon monitoring remains constrained by the sparse spatial and temporal availability of field inventories and airborne structural measurements.

By Shashika Lamahewage, Chandi Witharana
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Integrating national forest inventory, airborne lidar, and satellite imagery for wall-to-wall mapping of forest structure with computer vision

arXiv:2606. 20291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remote sensing is increasingly relied upon to deliver actionable science for forest and wildfire risk management across large landscapes.

By Luke J. Zachmann, David D. Diaz, Vincent A. Landau, Chelsey Walden-Schreiner, Tony Chang, Nathan E. Rutenbeck, Katharyn A. Duffy, Kiarie Ndegwa, Andreas Gros, Scott Conway, Guy Bayes
arXiv Computer Vision
2d ago

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 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 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)
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
Jul 7

Phase-Preserving Trimodal Transformer for Tropical Forest Biomass Estimation Using Optical and PolInSAR Data

arXiv:2607. 03663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The accurate estimation of Above-Ground Biomass (AGB) in mature tropical forests remains a critical challenge in remote sensing, primarily due to the saturation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) signals in high-density areas and persistent cloud cover affecting optical imagery.

By Luiz Felipe Parente Santiago (Institute of Computing, Brazilian Army Research Institute in the Amazon), Rosiane Rodrigues de Freitas (Institute of Computing), Daniel Rodrigues dos Santos (Military Institute of Engineering), Felipe Ferrari (Military Institute of Engineering)
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

Earth observation embeddings are effective sub-grid descriptors for probabilistic weather downscaling

arXiv:2608. 12271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global weather reanalyses and forecasts resolve the evolving atmospheric state on coarse grids, but site-specific applications require predictions at arbitrary locations where near-surface conditions also depend on unresolved terrain and land-surface properties.

By Pedro Sousa (Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge), Will Tebbutt (Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge), Sadiq Jaffer (Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge), Robin Young (Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge), Anil Madhavapeddy (Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge), Richard E. Turner (Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge)