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
Oct 16

Multi-Modal, Multi-Temporal Geospatial Foundation Models Improve Global Above-Ground Biomass Estimation

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