LiDAR

Expanding NEON biodiversity surveys with new instrumentation and machine learning approaches

A core goal of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is to measure changes in biodiversity across the 30‐yr horizon of the network. In contrast to NEON’s extensive use of automated instruments to collect environmental data, NEON’s …

RandCrowns: A Quantitative Metric for Imprecisely Labeled Tree Crown Delineation

Supervised methods for object delineation in remote sensing require labeled ground-truth data. Gathering sufficient high quality ground-truth data is difficult, especially when targets are of irregular shape or difficult to distinguish from …

A remote sensing derived data set of 100 million individual tree crowns for the National Ecological Observatory Network

Forests provide biodiversity, ecosystem, and economic services. Information on individual trees is important for understanding forest ecosystems but obtaining individual-level data at broad scales is challenging due to the costs and logistics of data …

Rethinking the fundamental unit of ecological remote sensing: Estimating individual level plant traits at scale

Functional ecology has increasingly focused on describing ecological communities based on their traits (measurable features of individuals that affect their fitness and performance). Analyzing trait distributions within and among forests could …

DeepForest: A Python package for RGB deep learning tree crown delineation

Remote sensing of forested landscapes can transform the speed, scale and cost of forest research. The delineation of individual trees in remote sensing images is an essential task in forest analysis. Here we introduce a new Python package, DeepForest …

Cross-site learning in deep learning RGB tree crown detection

Tree crown detection is a fundamental task in remote sensing for forestry and ecosystem ecology. While many individual tree segmentation algorithms have been proposed, the development and testing of these algorithms is typically site specific, with …

A data science challenge for converting airborne remote sensing data into ecological information

Ecology has reached the point where data science competitions, in which multiple groups solve the same problem using the same data by different methods, will be productive for advancing quantitative methods for tasks such as species identification …

Individual tree-crown detection in RGB imagery using semi-supervised deep learning neural networks

Remote sensing can transform the speed, scale, and cost of biodiversity and forestry surveys. Data acquisition currently outpaces the ability to identify individual organisms in high resolution imagery. We outline an approach for identifying …