FoScenes: A high-fidelity, large-scale 3D forest plant area density product derived from open-access airborne lidar data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The accurate three-dimensional (3D) distribution of plant area density (PAD) within forests is crucial for understanding canopy structure and provides essential scene inputs for 3D Radiative Transfer Models (RTMs) to facilitate remote sensing interpretation. However, current lidar-based voxelization methods that estimate detailed PAD distributions often cover limited areas, constraining their applications in conducting broad forest studies and interpreting Earth Observation Satellite (EOS) data of various scales and resolutions. To address this, we developed the Large-Scale Path Volume Leaf Area Density (LS-PVlad), a novel forest 3D reconstruction workflow capable of producing extensive high-resolution 3D voxelized forest scenes (up to 100 km 2 with ≤2 m voxel size) from worldwide open-access airborne lidar scanning (ALS) data. By applying LS-PVlad to the ALS data acquired during the extensive NASA Goddard's LiDAR, Hyperspectral & Thermal Imager (G-LiHT) campaigns, we developed the first release of FoScenes—a high-fidelity PAD product comprising 40 seamless scenes from 28 diverse forest sites, with individual area ranging from ∼50 to ∼11,000 ha. The leaf area estimates of LS-PVlad have been validated by two-year field-measured leaf area index (LAI) from litter collection (best RMSE = 0.35 m 2 /m 2 ) and digital hemispherical photography (DHP) images (RMSE = 0.46 m 2 /m 2 ) across multiple plots at a deciduous forest site. Additionally, a broad comparison between FoScenes and MODIS plant/leaf area index product demonstrates high consistency (R 2 = 0.70, RMSE = 0.86 m 2 /m 2 ). By providing multi-dimensional forest characterizations, FoScenes enables temporal insights into structure dynamics. Its integration with the discrete anisotropic radiative transfer (DART) model underscores the potential of FoScenes for extensive 3D RTM applications at various scales. • We developed a large-scale ALS-data-driven 3D forest reconstruction workflow. • FoScenes product consists of 40 various forest scenes derived from NASA G-LiHT data. • The estimated leaf/plant area index strongly aligns with field data and EOS products. • FoScenes captures temporal structure variation by multi-dimensional characterization. • FoScenes can be integrated into DART for realistic simulations at varied scales.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".