Mining Field Data for Tree Species Recognition at Scale

Abstract

Individual tree species labels are particularly hard to acquire due to the expert knowledge needed and the limitations of photointerpretation. Here, we present a methodology to automatically mine species labels from public forest inventory data, using available pretrained tree detection models. We identify tree instances in aerial imagery and match them with field data with close to zero human involvement. We conduct a series of experiments on the resulting dataset, and show a beneficial effect when adding noisy or even unlabeled data points, highlighting a strong potential for large-scale individual species mapping.