Carbon Stock Estimation at Scale from Aerial and Satellite Imagery

In the ongoing efforts to mitigate climate change effect, the capability to reliably estimate forest carbon stock on a global scale is vital to support sustainable development. This entails the investigation of tree coverage from diverse forest ecosystems worldwide, necessitating a substantial volume of high-resolution images. This paper integrates a variety of remote sensing data sources, from aerial to satellite imagery, for the training and development of our AI system. Given the heterogeneous nature of these data sources, we develop a standardization method to ensure consistent image size and resolution between source platforms. Our harmonized dataset includes 86,088 training images and 21,768 validation images, each with a high resolution of 1.194 m² per pixel. We introduce a novel technique for tree semantic segmentation which offers a more effective alternative to traditional individual tree crown delineation for large-scale tree coverage estimation. To assess the adaptability of our AI models, we conducted experiments on a hand-annotated satellite image test set and achieved a High Vegetation IoU score of 45.73%. Building on these findings, we present an interactive web-based Geographic Information System for navigating high vegetation segmented satellite images and estimating carbon stock on a global scale.