SelectAnyTree: A Promptable Instance Segmentation Model for 3D Forest LiDAR Point Clouds

Instance segmentation of trees in forest LiDAR point clouds is constrained by label scarcity: A single hectare holds millions of points and hundreds of overlapping tree crowns, making manual annotation laborious, while automatic pre-segmentations offer no interactive refinement. Inspired by the promptable paradigm of foundation segmentation models, we propose SelectAnyTree, which delineates any individual tree in a 3D forest point cloud from a few clicks and is purpose-built for promptable instance segmentation of 3D forest LiDAR scenes. The proposed SelectAnyTree couples three lightweight stages: (1) Sparse voxel scene encoder that embeds the forest once into reusable features, (2) Click-to-query prompt encoder that turns each click into a single content query from its 3D position, positive/negative polarity, and the backbone feature of its nearest voxel, and (3) State-space query decoder that converts this query into one tree mask with linear-time complexity, with a mask feedback that conditions each refinement round on the previous mask. Each additional tree therefore costs only a lightweight prompt-encoding and decoding pass, and the full model requires just 19.4 M parameters, far fewer than prior promptable 3D models. Additionally, we exploit forest-aware information by detecting treetops as local maxima of the Canopy Height Model (CHM) computed from the scene geometry, and associating one with the user's click as a free initial click. Across seven diverse forest regions and an independent held-out dataset, SelectAnyTree segments a target tree to 79.9 Intersection-over-Union (IoU) from a single click, 24.7 points above the strongest promptable baseline, and reaches every accuracy target with the fewest clicks. The source code is available at https://github.com/thanhhff/SelectAnyTree.

Neural Tree Reconstruction for the Open Forest Observatory

The Open Forest Observatory (OFO) is a collaboration across universities and other partners to make low-cost forest mapping accessible to ecologists, land managers, and the general public. The OFO is building both a database of geospatial forest data as well as open-source methods and tools for forest mapping by uncrewed aerial vehicle. Such data are useful for a variety of climate applications including prioritizing reforestation efforts, informing wildfire hazard reduction, and monitoring carbon sequestration. In the current iteration of the OFO's forest map database, 3D tree maps are created using classical structure-from-motion techniques. This approach is prone to artifacts, lacks detail, and has particular difficulty on the forest floor where the input data (overhead imagery) has limited visibility. These reconstruction errors can potentially propagate to the downstream scientific tasks (e.g. a wildfire simulation.) Advances in 3D reconstruction, including methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), produce higher quality results that are more robust to sparse views and support data-driven priors. We explore ways to incorporate NeRFs into the OFO dataset, outline future work to support even more state-of-the-art 3D vision models, and describe the importance of high-quality 3D reconstructions for forestry applications.

SegmentAnyTreeV2: Scaling Transformer-Based Tree Instance Segmentation Across Sensors, Platforms, and Forests

We present SegmentAnyTreeV2, a sensor- and platform-agnostic framework for semantic and instance segmentation of forest point clouds. The model combines a serialization-based Point Transformer v3 backbone with a lightweight semantic head and a tree-focused cross-attention mask decoder. Semantic predictions restrict instance decoding to tree-class voxels, while instance-aware query initialization, one-to-many seed supervision, and asymmetric mask scoring improve separation in dense and structurally complex stands. We further introduce FOR-instance v3, an expanded benchmark comprising 427 scenes and 26,496 annotated trees across diverse biomes, forest structures, and LiDAR platforms. On the FOR-instanceV2 test split, SegmentAnyTreeV2 achieves 90.5% precision, 80.2% recall, 85.0% F1, 90.7% coverage, and 87.6% semantic mIoU, outperforming previous learning-based methods in both instance detection and mask completeness. Zero-shot evaluation on independent sites further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization.