A Versatile, Production-Oriented Approach to High-Resolution Tree-Canopy Mapping in Urban and Suburban Landscapes Using GEOBIA and Data Fusion
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The benefits of tree canopy in urban and suburban landscapes are increasingly well known: stormwater runoff control, air-pollution mitigation, temperature regulation, carbon storage, wildlife habitat, neighborhood cohesion, and other social indicators of quality of life. However, many urban areas lack high-resolution tree canopy maps that document baseline conditions or inform tree-planting programs, limiting effective study and management. This paper describes a GEOBIA approach to tree-canopy mapping that relies on existing public investments in LiDAR, multispectral imagery, and thematic GIS layers, thus eliminating or reducing data acquisition costs. This versatile approach accommodates datasets of varying content and quality, first using LiDAR derivatives to identify aboveground features and then a combination of LiDAR and imagery to differentiate trees from buildings and other anthropogenic structures. Initial tree canopy objects are then refined through contextual analysis, morphological smoothing, and small-gap filling. Case studies from locations in the United States and Canada show how a GEOBIA approach incorporating data fusion and enterprise processing can be used for producing high-accuracy, high-resolution maps for large geographic extents. These maps are designed specifically for practical application by planning and regulatory end users who expect not only high accuracy but also high realism and visual coherence.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it