Accurate tree-level forest monitoring using laser scanning data requires reliable tree delineation, consistent tree correspondence across multitemporal point clouds, and accurate estimation of tree attributes and their change. Reconstructing tree growth in boreal forests is challenging due to the scarcity of historical stem-level data, propagation of errors from older sensors into change estimation, and growth rates with a magnitude of measurement uncertainty. This study investigates a framework for estimating individual tree diameter at breast height (DBH) and stem volume growth using 136 point clouds acquired between 2014--2025 with 11 scanners on airborne (ALS), mobile (MLS), and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) platforms across boreal forest test sites. Trees were delineated from an MLS point cloud using deep learning-based segmentation which was transferred to the remaining point clouds, resulting in reliable multitemporal tree correspondence. Stem curves were derived from MLS/TLS data, with ALS data used for height estimation, enabling DBH and volume estimation and time series. A height growth-based scaling model was used to reconstruct stem attributes across time and estimate growth. Results showed that modeled growth achieved higher agreement with manual growth estimates than differencing independently estimated attributes from point clouds. The modeled-manual 5- and 10-year growth RMSEs were 55--111\% and 26--67\% for DBH, and 31--87\% and 21--67\% for volume, respectively, depending on plot difficulty. The scaling model was temporally robust, with errors remaining stable or stabilizing after 5--6 years, reaching maximum RMSEs of 8--12\% for DBH and 12--23\% for volume after 12 years. Combining MLS/TLS-derived stem measurements with multitemporal ALS-derived heights provided a robust framework for individual tree growth estimation without requiring multiple under-canopy scans.
Accurate identification of Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica plantations is important for monitoring afforestation quality and ecological restoration in northern Shaanxi. This paper proposes ROSA-TFormer, a radar-optical sensor-aware temporal Transformer for P. sylvestris classification using Sentinel-1/2 time-series data generated on Google Earth Engine. The model integrates separate SAR and optical embedding branches, a sensor-aware gate, and temporal attention pooling to capture multi-source seasonal features. Experiments on monthly and half-month point-level datasets show that ROSA-TFormer achieves strong classification performance, with 99.67% overall accuracy, 99.56% macro F1, and 98.91% P. sylvestris F1 on the HalfMonth-dataBig dataset. Spatial block validation and ablation results further indicate the effectiveness of radar-optical temporal fusion and sensor-aware modeling. The results demonstrate the potential of ROSA-TFormer for point-level P. sylvestris plantation classification, while broader wall-to-wall validation remains necessary.
Trung Thanh Nguyen, Tuan-Anh Vu, Duc Viet Le +4cs.CV
AI-based semantic and instance segmentation of terrestrial and drone LiDAR point clouds is emerging as a transformative approach for converting the complex 3D structure of forests into actionable information for forest monitoring and biodiversity assessment. However, forest LiDAR scenes remain highly challenging due to their large data volumes, irregular sampling density, overlapping and complex canopy structure, and geographic variability. Existing methods based on sparse convolutions or Transformers achieve promising results, but suffer from two key limitations: Quadratic complexity of attention scales poorly to large forest scenes, and Generic context modeling does not exploit forest structural priors, limiting tree separation in complex regions. To address these challenges, we propose ForestMamba, a structure-aware method that incorporates forest-specific priors into feature encoding, query generation, and query refinement, while replacing quadratic attention with linear-time state-space modeling. First, we introduce a sparse encoder with vertical-priority slab serialization that organizes sparse voxels into vertically coherent sequences for efficient long-range context modeling. Second, we propose a geometry-guided query initialization strategy based on an on-the-fly multi-scale Canopy Height Model (CHM), where canopy maxima provide ecologically meaningful query seeds, supplemented by Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) to cover understory trees. Third, we design a Mamba-based query decoder that combines local kNN voxel aggregation with a spatial dual-path Mamba for query refinement with linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments across seven forest regions demonstrate that ForestMamba consistently outperforms existing baselines in both segmentation tasks, while achieving 3 times faster inference and 2.3 times lower GPU memory than Transformer-based methods.