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NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2025

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Abstract

Abstract The site index (SI) describes a site’s potential to produce wood volume. Accurate information on SI in young forests is essential for planning thinning operations and projecting future growth and yield. For tree species that form annual branch whorls, information on interwhorl distances along the stem may be used to determine the SI in young forests. Branch whorls, and consequently tree height growth trajectories, can be detected automatically using deep learning on very dense laser scanning data. In the current study, we demonstrate this approach in a case study in a young Norway spruce forest. We trained a pose estimation Convolutional Neural Network and detected branch whorls of 97 dominant trees in 54 plots scanned with mobile laser scanning data. We predicted SI determined from detected branch whorls in three different sections of each tree, selected in the stem height range between 2.5 and 8 m: all whorls, the lowest six whorls, and whorls selected with an automatic selection procedure. We compared the obtained SI to the SI determined from field-measured branch whorls. Obtained values of precision, recall, and F1 score for the branch whorl detection were 0.66, 0.58, and 0.62, respectively. Values of root mean square error and mean differences between reference and predicted SI ranged between 19.8%–20.9% and −3.6%–4.0%, respectively. Although the tested approach showed potential for SI determination in young forests, the obtained errors were large. This was due to detection errors and high sensitivity to small changes in height increment. These issues highlight the need for further research to improve branch whorl detection accuracy and address challenges associated with determining the SI in young forests.

Abstract

1. Field-based vegetation mapping is important for environmental assessments.Often, the area covered by a species is estimated visually within a reference frame.However, such assessments are prone to observer bias and a large variability. 2. We developed a deep learning pipeline relying on YOLOv8 models to segmentspecies and estimate the percentage cover (%) of Vaccinium myrtillus (blueberry)and Vaccinium vitis-idaea (lingonberry), two key understory species in borealforests. We used 138 nadir and downward-looking images of the forest floorcaptured in correspondence with 50 × 50 cm vegetation sub-plots assessedwithin National Forest Inventory (NFI) plots. First, we trained a bounding-boxframe detection model to crop the image to the same area assessed in the field.Second, we trained an instance segmentation model to classify species. Third,we flattened the class values into a semantic raster and estimated the species-specific cover by pixel counting. 3. We evaluated our method against an independent test set of 156 images andfound a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 8.82% for blueberry and 3.49% forlingonberry and no substantial systematic errors. An additional comparison withocular estimation by various field workers for the same plots showed that themodel estimates were within the range of estimates by field workers 8 out of 9times for blueberry and 7 out of 9 times for lingonberry. 4. The developed method shows promise in reducing observer bias and variabilityin vegetation surveys, thereby improving their consistency while significantlyreducing the time needed for species-specific coverage estimation. This isparticularly beneficial for repeated measurements and monitoring vegetationcover dynamics. However, as the method relies on RGB data, it is limited toestimating the percentage of visible species that are not obscured by others.Expanding the method to include a broader range of cover classes (e.g. grasses,rocks, logs) or species could automate the capture of crucial information