deadtrees.earth - An open-access and interactive database for centimeter-scale aerial imagery to uncover global tree mortality dynamics

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Tarih

2025

Dergi Başlığı

Dergi ISSN

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Yayıncı

ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC

Erişim Hakkı

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Özet

Excessive tree mortality is a global concern and remains poorly understood as it is a complex phenomenon. We lack global and temporally continuous coverage on tree mortality data. Ground-based observations on tree mortality, e.g., derived from national inventories, are very sparse, and may not be standardized or spatially explicit. Earth observation data, combined with supervised machine learning, offer a promising approach to map overstory tree mortality in a consistent manner over space and time. However, global-scale machine learning requires broad training data covering a wide range of environmental settings and forest types. Low altitude observation platforms (e.g., drones or airplanes) provide a cost-effective source of training data by capturing high-resolution orthophotos of overstory tree mortality events at centimeter-scale resolution. Here, we introduce deadtrees.earth, an open-access platform hosting more than two thousand centimeter-resolution orthophotos, covering more than 1,000,000 ha, of which more than 58,000 ha are manually annotated with live/dead tree classifications. This community-sourced and rigorously curated dataset can serve as a comprehensive reference dataset to uncover tree mortality patterns from local to global scales using spacebased Earth observation data and machine learning models. This will provide the basis to attribute tree mortality patterns to environmental changes or project tree mortality dynamics to the future. The open nature of deadtrees.earth, together with its curation of high-quality, spatially representative, and ecologically diverse data will continuously increase our capacity to uncover and understand tree mortality dynamics.

Açıklama

Anahtar Kelimeler

Orthophoto drone tree mortality, Remote sensing, Database Citizen science, Forests open-access

Kaynak

REMOTE SENSING OF ENVIRONMENT

WoS Q Değeri

Q1

Scopus Q Değeri

Cilt

332

Sayı

Künye