TreeFinder: A US-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Individual Tree Mortality Monitoring Using High-Resolution Aerial Imagery

Abstract

Monitoring individual tree mortality at scale has been found to be crucial for understanding forest loss, ecosystem resilience, carbon fluxes, and climate-induced impacts. However, the fine-granularity monitoring faces major challenges on both the data and methodology sides because: (1) finding isolated individual-level tree deaths requires high-resolution remote sensing images with broad coverage, and (2) compared to regular geo-objects (e.g., buildings), dead trees often exhibit weaker contrast and high variability across tree types, landscapes and ecosystems. Existing datasets on tree mortality primarily rely on moderate-resolution satellite imagery (e.g., 30m resolution), which aims to detect large-patch wipe-outs but is unable to recognize individual-level tree mortality events. Several efforts have explored alternatives via very-high-resolution drone imagery. However, drone images are highly expensive and can only be collected at local scales, which are therefore not suitable for national-scale applications and beyond. To bridge the gaps, we introduce TreeFinder, the first high-resolution remote sensing benchmark dataset designed for individual-level tree mortality mapping across the Contiguous United States (CONUS). Specifically, the dataset uses NAIP imagery at 0.6m resolution that provides wall-to-wall coverage of the entire CONUS. TreeFinder contains images with pixel-level labels generated via extensive manual annotation that covers forested areas in 48 states with over 23,000 hectares. All annotations are rigorously validated using multi-temporal NAIP images and auxiliary vegetation indices from remote sensing imagery. Moreover, TreeFinder includes multiple evaluation scenarios to test the models' ability in generalizing across different geographic regions, climate zones, and forests with different plant function types. Finally, we develop benchmarks using a suite of semantic segmentation models, including both convolutional architectures and more recent foundation models based on vision transformers for general and remote sensing images. Our dataset and code are publicly available on Kaggle and GitHub: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/zhihaow/tree-finder and https://github.com/zhwang0/treefinder.