Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Global forest typology at 10-meter resolution for forest and land-use monitoring
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Distinguishing forest types---primary, naturally regenerating, planted, and plantation forests---from agricultural tree crops and other land uses is essential for carbon accounting, biodiversity assessment, conservation planning, and supply-chain regulation. However, no existing global dataset resolves this typology at high spatial resolution. We present the Forest Typology (ForTy) v1 dataset, a [...]
GEDIMetrics: a QGIS plugin for accessing and integrating multi-product GEDI spaceborne LiDAR data
Published: 2026-05-18
Subjects: Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Management, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) provides near-global, high-resolution 3D LiDAR observations of forest vertical structure. However, GEDI products are distributed as independent HDF5 files organised by beam, requiring ad-hoc workflows for data discovery, quality filtering, spatial subsetting, and footprint-level alignment across products. Existing tools either target a single [...]
Remote sensing and deep learning for standing dead-tree detection and mapping: A review of advances, challenges, and future directions
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Standing dead trees are visible indicators of recent tree mortality and an important transitional component linking forest disturbance to future lying deadwood, habitat availability, and carbon storage. As drought, insect outbreaks, pathogens, and climate extremes intensify tree mortality worldwide, scalable methods are needed to detect and map standing dead trees consistently across forest [...]
Changes in soil moisture availability and water yield in response to longleaf pine restoration in southeast Texas
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Our study, based in Trinity County, Texas, focused on whether strategic management of longleaf pine forest could promote a less water-intensive land cover type. We modeled soil evapotranspiration (ET) by measuring vertically stratified soil moisture (15-120 cm) across five forest monitoring sites, four of which received restoration treatments, and one served as a control. Forest attributes, [...]
Advances in tree species identification from high-resolution aerial imagery and deep learning
Published: 2026-03-20
Subjects: Forest Management, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Tree species diversity shapes forest functioning, carbon storage, and ecosystem resilience, yet species-level inventories remain limited outside local studies. High-resolution aerial imagery and deep learning now enable individual tree crowns to be mapped at high spatial detail, offering new pathways for biodiversity and climate impact assessments. We synthesize 103 studies (2017–2024), [...]
A Weighted Fitting Approach for Diameter Distributions from Horizontal Point Sampling
Published: 2025-10-31
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Horizontal point sampling (HPS) produces size-biased tallies that cannot be fit directly with standard probability distributions without distorting diameter distribution estimates. Previous work resolves this by deriving bespoke size-biased probability density functions (PDFs) for each assumed distribution. We revisit the problem and formalise a weighted non-linear least squares approach that [...]
Local Prediction of Temperate Forest Structure in Eastern North America Using LiDAR, Radar, and Optical Data
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Forest structure underpins the emergence of ecological patterns and processes yet remains costly to measure directly at broad scales. NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission provides three-dimensional LiDAR measurements at discrete footprints, leaving spatial gaps that complicate wall-to-wall mapping. Few studies have produced high-resolution, broad-extent predictions of [...]
Complex Realities, Simple Signals? Global Evaluation of Early Warning Signals for Forest Mortality Events
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Sustainability
Forests around the world are increasingly experiencing large-scale regional mortality events as a result of droughts and heat waves. Despite their considerable impacts on the material, non-material, and regulatory contributions of forest ecosystems to people, these mortality events remain difficult to predict. Temporal Early Warning Signals (EWS) based on the concept of Critical Slowing Down [...]
Insights from the Unseen - Occlusion in Forest Laser Scanning
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Laser scanning is a powerful tool for assessing the structural complexity of forests and its role in ecosystem processes and functioning. Laser scans are however highly affected by occlusion (where objects block laser pulses), resulting in data gaps within the 3D representation of the forest. Although occlusion is a well-known and frequently discussed challenge for estimating forest structural [...]
Beyond the mangroves: a global synthesis of tidal forested wetland types, drivers and future information opportunities
Published: 2025-09-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
There is increasing awareness of the global diversity of tidal forested wetlands (TFWs) and their significance in the provision of ecosystem services. These ecosystems, including mangrove forests, tidal freshwater forested wetlands, supratidal forests and transitional forests together span multiple climatic zones, geomorphic settings, and inundation and salinity regimes. We utilise case studies [...]
The effectiveness and potential cost-savings of operator select to manage brush and thin longleaf pine stands
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Forest Management, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
We present a case study where loggers thinned and managed brush in longleaf pine stands that went unmanaged for a lengthy period in Trinity County, Texas, USA. Stands were overstocked and had a dense, shrubby understory from years of fire exclusion. Our main objectives were to compare the outcomes and cost-savings of loggers selecting trees to thin, or “operator select”, versus timber marking, [...]
Evaluation of the METRIC and TSEB remote sensing evapotranspiration models in the floodplain area of the Thaya and Morava Rivers
Published: 2024-04-24
Subjects: Hydrology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Study region: Floodplain ecosystem region at the confluence of the Morava and Thaya Rivers, Czech Republic. Study focus: Accurate determination of actual evapotranspiration (ETa) is essential for understanding surface hydrological conditions. The aim of this study was to evaluate two remote sensing models, METRIC and TSEB, for estimating ETa and energy fluxes in two ecosystems using the eddy [...]
Advancing forest aboveground biomass mapping by integrating GEDI with other Earth Observation data using a cloud computing platform: A case study of Alabama, United States
Published: 2024-04-06
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is a crucial indicator for monitoring carbon and requires accurate quantification. This study aimed to advance AGB estimation using open access Earth observation (EO) data and cloud computing, focusing on Alabama, USA. The specific objectives were to: (1) develop a workflow for creating a 30 m forest AGBD map with GEDI, using GEE, (2) evaluate and compare [...]
Electric Circuit Theory as a method for monitoring tree water deficit at different scales
Published: 2023-07-11
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Climate change is expected to alter precipitation patterns, making droughts more frequent in some areas, which will expose trees to more severe water deficits which could result in the catastrophic collapse of their water transport system and, eventually, mortality. To inform forest management and tree species suitability to increase forest resilience requires a robust method for understanding [...]
Mechanisms underlying the vulnerability of seasonally dry ecosystems to drought
Published: 2022-05-20
Subjects: Hydrology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Root-zone water storage (RWS) dynamics regulate when plants experience drought-related water stress and mortality. However, because RWS capacity (Smax) is poorly known, it remains challenging to translate variability in precipitation to water stress. Here, we investigate the relationship between precipitation variability and Smax and implement a framework for identifying the vulnerability of [...]