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Modelling Framework For Fire And Smoke Detection In Imagery

This framework was developed to ingest images/video images to train and test artificial neural network structures for image-based detection of fire and smoke. The code includes data preprocessing, model development, and testing. The framework is designed to work with RGB video imagery.

Griffel, LloydM.↗

An Automated Method for Mapping Giant Kelp Canopy Dynamics from UAV

Satellite and aerial imagery have been used extensively for mapping the abundance and distribution of giant kelp ( Macrocystis pyrifera ) in southern California. There is now great potential for using unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) to map kelp canopy at very high resolutions. However, tides and currents have been shown to affect the amount of floating kelp canopy on the water surface, and the impacts of these processes on remotely sensed kelp estimates in this region have not been fully quantified. UAVs were used to map fine-scale changes in canopy area due to tidal height and current speed at kelp forests off the coast of Palos Verdes, CA and Santa Barbara, CA. An automated method for detecting kelp canopy was developed that was 67% accurate using red-green-blue (RGB) UAV imagery and 93% accurate using multispectral UAV imagery across a range of weather, ocean, and illumination conditions. Increases in tidal height of 1 m reduced the amount of floating kelp canopy by 15% in Santa Barbara and by over 30% in Palos Verdes. The effect of current speed on visible kelp canopy was inconclusive, but there was a trend towards lower canopy area with increased current speed. Therefore, while tidal height and current speed can introduce significant variability to estimates of kelp abundance, the magnitude of this variability is site specific. Still, UAVs are a valuable tool for mapping of kelp canopy and can provide greater spatial resolution and temporal coverage than is possible from many satellite sensors. This data can provide insight into the patterns and drivers of high frequency fluctuations in kelp abundance.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) LiDAR and DEM data from two NGEE Arctic Sites, Seward Peninsula, Alaska, Winter 2022

From April 3 through April 6 of 2022, airborne remote sensing data was collected by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) in collaboration with NGEE Arctic scientists. Snow-on data was collected around two NGEE Arctic study sites on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska: Teller mm 27 and Kougarok mm 64. A Robinson R44 II helicopter with a RIEGL VQ-580 II airborne laser scanner was used to collect the LiDAR point cloud data for each study site. This survey was conducted during expected peak snow cover at the end of the winter on the Seward Peninsula, and can be paired with data collected in 2021 during the snow-off campaign "National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) LiDAR, Imagery, and DEM data from five NGEE Arctic Sites, Seward Peninsula, Alaska, August 2021" (Singhania et al., 2023) (NGA270). This data package contains LiDAR point clouds (.las), Digital Elevation Models (.tif), and shapefiles of the .las tiling system (.shp). A project report detailing data collection details, GNSS stations and GNSS corrections, and processing steps is also included. The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments: Arctic (NGEE Arctic), was a research effort to reduce uncertainty in Earth System Models by developing a predictive understanding of carbon-rich Arctic ecosystems and feedbacks to climate. NGEE Arctic was supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The NGEE Arctic project had two field research sites: 1) located within the Arctic polygonal tundra coastal region on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) and the North Slope near Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska and 2) multiple areas on the discontinuous permafrost region of the Seward Peninsula north of Nome, Alaska. Through observations, experiments, and synthesis with existing datasets, NGEE Arctic provided an enhanced knowledge base for multi-scale modeling and contributed to improved process representation at global pan-Arctic scales within the Department of Energy's Earth system Model (the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM), and specifically within the E3SM Land Model component (ELM).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Development of a Miniaturized Mobile Mapping System for In-Row, Under-Canopy Phenotyping

This paper focuses on the development of a miniaturized mobile mapping platform with advantages over current agricultural phenotyping systems in terms of acquiring data that facilitate under-canopy plant trait extraction. The system is based on an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) for in-row, under-canopy data acquisition to deliver accurately georeferenced 2D and 3D products. The paper addresses three main aspects pertaining to the UGV development: (a) architecture of the UGV mobile mapping system (MMS), (b) quality assessment of acquired data in terms of georeferencing information as well as derived 3D point cloud, and (c) ability to derive phenotypic plant traits using data acquired by the UGV MMS. The experimental results from this study demonstrate the ability of the UGV MMS to acquire dense and accurate data over agricultural fields that would facilitate highly accurate plant phenotyping (better than above-canopy platforms such as unmanned aerial systems and high-clearance tractors). Plant centers and plant count with an accuracy in the 90% range have been achieved.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Multiple RGB ortho-mosaics and digital surface models in 2017 and 2018 across the Lower Montane site in the East River Watershed, Colorado

Aerial imagery was collected at the Lower Montane site (Pumphouse) in the East River Watershed, Colorado during the spring, summer, and fall seasons of 2017 and 2018 to improve the understanding of seasonal vegetation dynamics and their drivers. The datasets include Red-Green-Blue (RGB) ortho-mosaics and digital surface models (DSMs) inferred from the Unoccupied Aerial System (UAS) acquired aerial RGB imagery for June 3, June 19, July 7, and August 14, 2017, and for March 14, April 26, June 1, June 18, July 6, and August 7, 2018. Real-Time Kinematic Global Positioning System (RTK-GPS) surveyed Ground control points (GCPs) were used to increase the reconstruction accuracy. The reconstructed RGB mosaics and DSMs have been trimmed to cover a similar spatial domain. The accuracy of the RGB mosaics is considered high (~10 cm). DSM accuracy is highest (~10 cm) where sufficient GCPS are available, and more difficult to assess elsewhere (see reconstruction reports for uncertainty estimates). The dataset includes a total of 20 GeoTIFF (.tif) files, 10 PDF (.pdf) files, 3 data CSV (.csv) files, and 2 metadata CSV (.csv) files. Feel free to contact the authors with any questions or collaboration interests.This work was supported by the Watershed Function Science Focus Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Influence of soil heterogeneity on soybean plant development and crop yield evaluated using time-series of UAV and ground-based geophysical imagery

Understanding the interactions among agricultural processes, soil, and plants is necessary for optimizing crop yield and productivity. This study focuses on developing effective monitoring and analysis methodologies that estimate key soil and plant properties. These methodologies include data acquisition and processing approaches that use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and surface geophysical techniques. In particular, we applied these approaches to a soybean farm in Arkansas to characterize the soil–plant coupled spatial and temporal heterogeneity, as well as to identify key environmental factors that influence plant growth and yield. UAV-based multitemporal acquisition of high-resolution RGB (red–green–blue) imagery and direct measurements were used to monitor plant height and photosynthetic activity. We present an algorithm that efficiently exploits the high-resolution UAV images to estimate plant spatial abundance and plant vigor throughout the growing season. Such plant characterization is extremely important for the identification of anomalous areas, providing easily interpretable information that can be used to guide near-real-time farming decisions. Additionally, high-resolution multitemporal surface geophysical measurements of apparent soil electrical conductivity were used to estimate the spatial heterogeneity of soil texture. By integrating the multiscale multitype soil and plant datasets, we identified the spatiotemporal co-variance between soil properties and plant development and yield. Our novel approach for early season monitoring of plant spatial abundance identified areas of low productivity controlled by soil clay content, while temporal analysis of geophysical data showed the impact of soil moisture and irrigation practice (controlled by topography) on plant dynamics. Our study demonstrates the effective coupling of UAV data products with geophysical data to extract critical information for farm management.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Strong temporal variation in treefall and branchfall rates in a tropical forest is related to extreme rainfall: results from 5 years of monthly drone data for a 50 ha plot

Abstract. A mechanistic understanding of how tropical-tree mortality responds to climate variation is urgently needed to predict how tropical-forest carbon pools will respond to anthropogenic global change, which is altering the frequency and intensity of storms, droughts, and other climate extremes in tropical forests. We used 5 years of approximately monthly drone-acquired RGB (red–green–blue) imagery for 50 ha of mature tropical forest on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, to quantify spatial structure; temporal variation; and climate correlates of canopy disturbances, i.e., sudden and major drops in canopy height due to treefalls, branchfalls, or the collapse of standing dead trees. Canopy disturbance rates varied strongly over time and were higher in the wet season, even though wind speeds were lower in the wet season. The strongest correlate of monthly variation in canopy disturbance rates was the frequency of extreme rainfall events. The size distribution of canopy disturbances was best fit by a Weibull function and was close to a power function for sizes above 25 m2. Treefalls accounted for 74 % of the total area and 52 % of the total number of canopy disturbances in treefalls and branchfalls combined. We hypothesize that extremely high rainfall is a good predictor because it is an indicator of storms having high wind speeds, as well as saturated soils that increase uprooting risk. These results demonstrate the utility of repeat drone-acquired data for quantifying forest canopy disturbance rates at fine temporal and spatial resolutions over large areas, thereby enabling robust tests of how temporal variation in disturbance relates to climate drivers. Further insights could be gained by integrating these canopy observations with high-frequency measurements of wind speed and soil moisture in mechanistic models to better evaluate proximate drivers and with focal tree observations to quantify the links to tree mortality and woody turnover.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Time-lapse imagery in 2017 and 2018 at the Lower Montane site in the East River Watershed, Colorado

Time-lapse imagery was collected using an automated RGB camera mounted on a pole at the base of the northeast-facing hillslope at the Lower Montane site in the East River Watershed, Colorado. The imagery was intended to support a better understanding of plant dynamics and their controls during the growing season. The dataset includes RGB images archived in four zip files (containing imagery in JPEG format), corresponding to photos taken from the hillslope and the adjacent floodplain during 2017 and 2018. A fifth zip file contains a few AVI movies that compare imagery between the two years. The AVI files can be read with most media players applications. The archive contains a total of five *.zip files and three csv metadata files (flmd.csv, dd.csv, and locations.csv).This work was supported by the Watershed Function Science Focus Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DeepAndes: A Self-Supervised Vision Foundation Model for Multispectral Remote Sensing Imagery of the Andes

By mapping sites at large scales usingremotely sensed data, archaeologists can generate unique insights into long-term demographic trends, interregional social networks, and human adaptations in the past. Remote sensing surveys complement field-based approaches, and their reach can be especially great when combined with deep learning and computer vision techniques. However, conventional supervised deep learning methods face challenges in annotating fine-grained archaeological features at scale. In addition, while recent vision foundation models have shown remarkable success in learning large-scale remote sensing data with minimal annotations, most off-the-shelf solutions are designed for RGB images rather than multispectral satellite imagery, such as the eight-band data used in our study. In this article, we introduce DeepAndes, a transformer-based vision foundation model trained on three million multispectral satellite images, specifically tailored for Andean archaeology. DeepAndes incorporates a customized DINOv2 self-supervised learning algorithm optimized for eight-band multispectral imagery, marking the first foundation model designed explicitly for the Andes region. We evaluate its image understanding performance through imbalanced image classification, image instance retrieval, and pixel-level semantic segmentation tasks. Our experiments show that DeepAndes achieves superior F1 scores, mean average precision, and Dice scores in few-shot learning scenarios, significantly outperforming models trained from scratch or pretrained on smaller datasets. This underscores the effectiveness of large-scale self-supervised pretraining in archaeological remote sensing.

Guo, Junlin [Vanderbilt Univ., Nashville, TN (Unit↗

A Multi-Sensor Unoccupied Aerial System Improves Characterization of Vegetation Composition and Canopy Properties in the Arctic Tundra: Supporting Data

Remote sensing data collected from Brookhaven National Laboratory's (BNL) heavy-lift unoccupied aerial system (UAS) octocopter platform - the Osprey - operated by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Science and Technology (TEST) group. Data was collected from a single flight over the Kougarok hillslope site on 26 July, 2018. The Osprey is a multi-sensor UAS platform that simultaneously measures very high spatial resolution optical red/green/blue (RGB) and thermal infrared (TIR) surface "skin" temperature imagery, as well as surface reflectance at 1nm intervals in the visible to near-infrared spectral range from ~350-1000 nm measured at regular intervals along each flight path. Derived image products include ortho-mosaiced RGB and TIR images, an RGB-based digital surface model (DSM) using the structure from motion (SfM) technique, digital terrain model (DTM), and a canopy height model. Ancillary aircraft data, flight mission parameters, and general flight conditions are also included. This dataset includes *.pdf, *.txt, *.tif, *.dat, and *.csv with most zipped in *.tar.gz files. The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments: Arctic (NGEE Arctic), was a research effort to reduce uncertainty in Earth System Models by developing a predictive understanding of carbon-rich Arctic ecosystems and feedbacks to climate. NGEE Arctic was supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The NGEE Arctic project had two field research sites: 1) located within the Arctic polygonal tundra coastal region on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) and the North Slope near Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska and 2) multiple areas on the discontinuous permafrost region of the Seward Peninsula north of Nome, Alaska. Through observations, experiments, and synthesis with existing datasets, NGEE Arctic provided an enhanced knowledge base for multi-scale modeling and contributed to improved process representation at global pan-Arctic scales within the Department of Energy's Earth system Model (the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM), and specifically within the E3SM Land Model component (ELM).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Landscape-scale Characterization of Arctic Tundra Vegetation Composition, Structure, and Function with a Multi-sensor Unoccupied Aerial System: Supporting Data.

Airborne remote sensing data collected using the Brookhaven National Laboratory's (BNL) heavy-lift unoccupied aerial system (UAS) octocopter platform, the Osprey, operated by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Science and Technology (TEST) group (https://www.bnl.gov/testgroup). This package includes data from three flights flown over the NGEE-Arctic Council, Kougarok and Teller sites in July, 2018. The Osprey is a multi-sensor UAS platform that simultaneously measures very high spatial resolution optical red/green/blue (RGB) and thermal infrared (TIR) surface 'skin' temperature imagery, as well as surface reflectance at 1 nm intervals in the visible to near-infrared spectral range 350 - 1000 nm measured at regular intervals along each flight path. Derived image products include ortho-mosaiced RGB and TIR images, an RGB-based digital surface model (DSM) using the structure from motion (SfM) technique, digital terrain model (DTM), and a canopy height model (CHM). In addition, a VNIR surface reflectance file is provided for the trigger locations collected during each flight campaign. Ancillary aircraft data, flight mission parameters, and general flight conditions provided by the onboard flight and data collection computers are also included. Unprocessed and processed data products are included in this package (processing levels 0-3). Data and metadata are provided as text (*.txt, *.json, *.kml, *hdr, *.enp), tabular (*.dat, *.csv, *.waypoint, ENVI format (no extension)), point cloud (*.laz) and image (*.jpg, *.tif, *png) formats. This metadata document contains flight campaign, instrument and file metadata, along with a description of data processing levels, data products and file naming scheme.The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments: Arctic (NGEE Arctic), a research effort to reduce uncertainty in Earth System Models by developing a predictive understanding of carbon-rich Arctic ecosystems and feedbacks to climate. NGEE Arctic was supported by the Department of Energy?s Office of Biological and Environmental Research.The NGEE Arctic project had two field research sites: 1) located within the Arctic polygonal tundra coastal region on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) and the North Slope near Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska and 2) multiple areas on the discontinuous permafrost region of the Seward Peninsula north of Nome, Alaska.Through observations, experiments, and synthesis with existing datasets, NGEE Arctic provided an enhanced knowledge base for multi-scale modeling and contributed to improved process representation at global pan-Arctic scales within the Department of Energy's Earth system Model (the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM), and specifically within the E3SM Land Model component (ELM).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Automated Sorghum Phenotyping and Trait Development Platform

There is an urgent need to accelerate energy crop development for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass. Our interdisciplinary team developed mobile, ground-based and aerial phenotyping platforms and advanced remote sensing data analysis tools to acquire and process imagery from different types of cameras (e.g. RGB, multispectral, hyperspectral, and thermal sensors) and LiDAR point cloud data in large-scale sorghum field trials during phase 1 of the project. Phase 2 focused on Technology to Market activities to deliver these systems to the market place coupled with targeted research programs to address specific limitations or challenges for these systems.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

Drone flight visible images, digital elevation maps, and geotiffs, Council, Seward Peninsula, Alaska, USA, July 2017

Remote sensing data collected from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBNL) unmanned aerial system (UAS) quadcopter platform – Inspire-1 – operated by the Ameriflux Management Project (ameriflux.lbl.gov) Technical Team. The Insprire-1 is a visible imagery UAS platform that simultaneously measures very high spatial resolution optical red/green/blue (RGB) at regular intervals along each flight path. This package includes data from four flight paths over the NGEE Arctic Council Road Site near mile marker 71 in the Seward Peninsula, Alaska in July 2017. Derived image products for each flight include ortho-mosaiced RGB, an RGB-based digital surface model (DSM) using the structure from motion (SfM) technique, and a digital terrain model (DTM). Ancillary aircraft data, flight mission parameters, and general flight conditions are also included. Unprocessed and processed data products are included in this package (processing levels 0-2). This metadata document contains flight campaign, instrument and file metadata, along with a description of data processing levels, data products and file naming scheme.The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments: Arctic (NGEE Arctic) was a research effort to reduce uncertainty in Earth System Models by developing a predictive understanding of carbon-rich Arctic ecosystems and feedbacks to climate. NGEE Arctic was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The NGEE Arctic project had two field research sites: 1) located within the Arctic polygonal tundra coastal region on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) and the North Slope near Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska and 2) multiple areas on the discontinuous permafrost region of the Seward Peninsula north of Nome, Alaska. Through observations, experiments, and synthesis with existing datasets, NGEE Arctic provided an enhanced knowledge base for multi-scale modeling and contributed to improved process representation at global pan-Arctic scales within the Department of Energy’s Earth system Model (the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM), and specifically within the E3SM Land Model component (ELM).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Drone flight visible images, digital elevation maps, and geotiffs, Teller, Seward Peninsula, Alaska, USA, July 2017

Remote sensing data collected from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBNL) unmanned aerial system (UAS) quadcopter platform – Inspire-1 – operated by the Ameriflux Management Project (ameriflux.lbl.gov) Technical Team. The Insprire-1 is a visible imagery UAS platform that simultaneously measures very high spatial resolution optical red/green/blue (RGB) at regular intervals along the flight path. This package includes data from a flight path over the NGEE Arctic Teller Site, west of mile marker 27 Bob Blodgett Highway in the Seward Peninsula, Alaska in July 2017. Derived image products include ortho-mosaiced RGB, an RGB-based digital surface model (DSM) using the structure from motion (SfM) technique, and a digital terrain model (DTM). Ancillary aircraft data, flight mission parameters, and general flight conditions are also included. Unprocessed and processed data products are included in this package (processing levels 0-2). This metadata document contains flight campaign, instrument and file metadata, along with a description of data processing levels, data products and file naming scheme.The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments: Arctic (NGEE Arctic) was a research effort to reduce uncertainty in Earth System Models by developing a predictive understanding of carbon-rich Arctic ecosystems and feedbacks to climate. NGEE Arctic was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The NGEE Arctic project had two field research sites: 1) located within the Arctic polygonal tundra coastal region on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) and the North Slope near Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska and 2) multiple areas on the discontinuous permafrost region of the Seward Peninsula north of Nome, Alaska. Through observations, experiments, and synthesis with existing datasets, NGEE Arctic provided an enhanced knowledge base for multi-scale modeling and contributed to improved process representation at global pan-Arctic scales within the Department of Energy’s Earth system Model (the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM), and specifically within the E3SM Land Model component (ELM).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Drone flight visible images, digital elevation maps, and geotiffs, Kougarok, Seward Peninsula, Alaska, USA, July 2017

Remote sensing data collected from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBNL) unmanned aerial system (UAS) quadcopter platform – Inspire-1 – operated by the Ameriflux Management Project (ameriflux.lbl.gov) Technical Team. The Insprire-1 is a visible imagery UAS platform that simultaneously measures very high spatial resolution optical red/green/blue (RGB) at regular intervals along each flight path. This package includes data from four flight paths over the NGEE Arctic Kougarok Site, west of mile marker 64 on Kuzitrin Road in the Seward Peninsula, Alaska in July 2017. Derived image products include ortho-mosaiced RGB, an RGB-based digital surface model (DSM) using the structure from motion (SfM) technique, and a digital terrain model (DTM). Ancillary aircraft data, flight mission parameters, and general flight conditions are also included. Unprocessed and processed data products are included in this package (processing levels 0-2). This metadata document contains flight campaign, instrument and file metadata, along with a description of data processing levels, data products and file naming scheme.The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments: Arctic (NGEE Arctic) was a research effort to reduce uncertainty in Earth System Models by developing a predictive understanding of carbon-rich Arctic ecosystems and feedbacks to climate. NGEE Arctic was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The NGEE Arctic project had two field research sites: 1) located within the Arctic polygonal tundra coastal region on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) and the North Slope near Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska and 2) multiple areas on the discontinuous permafrost region of the Seward Peninsula north of Nome, Alaska. Through observations, experiments, and synthesis with existing datasets, NGEE Arctic provided an enhanced knowledge base for multi-scale modeling and contributed to improved process representation at global pan-Arctic scales within the Department of Energy’s Earth system Model (the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM), and specifically within the E3SM Land Model component (ELM).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Topography, surface water distribution and subsurface structure in 2023 across an Arctic coastal tundra site near Utqiagvik, Alaska

Subsurface electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), active layer thickness measurements, photogrammetry, and topographic data were collected in September 2023 along a 475 m long, 20 m wide corridor that traverses various polygon types within the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) on the Alaskan Arctic Coastal Plain, approximately 4 miles from the Beaufort Sea near Utqiaġvik, Alaska. These measurements were designed to assess decadal changes in surface water distribution, topography, and subsurface structure across this dynamic landscape. This archive contains the datasets acquired in 2023 and references to the datasets acquired previously at the same location. The ERT survey was conducted along the 475 m transect using 0.5 m electrode spacing and a roll-along acquisition strategy. Thaw layer thicknesses were measured with a tile probe along the same transect. Photogrammetry data were acquired using an unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) and were used to generate a digital elevation model and an RGB mosaic. A real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS was used to survey the ERT electrodes and the ground control points for the aerial imagery. The dataset contains 5 *.csv data files, 6 *.csv metadata files, and 6 *.tif files.The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments: Arctic (NGEE Arctic), was a research effort to reduce uncertainty in Earth System Models by developing a predictive understanding of carbon-rich Arctic ecosystems and feedbacks to climate. NGEE Arctic was supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The NGEE Arctic project had two field research sites: 1) located within the Arctic polygonal tundra coastal region on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) and the North Slope near Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska and 2) multiple areas on the discontinuous permafrost region of the Seward Peninsula north of Nome, Alaska. Through observations, experiments, and synthesis with existing datasets, NGEE Arctic provided an enhanced knowledge base for multi-scale modeling and contributed to improved process representation at global pan-Arctic scales within the Department of Energy's Earth system Model (the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM), and specifically within the E3SM Land Model component (ELM).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

PRMI: A Dataset of Minirhizotron Images for Diverse Plant Root Study

Understanding a plant's root system architecture (RSA) is crucial for a variety of plant science problem domains including sustainability and climate adaptation. Minirhizotron (MR) technology is a widely-used approach for phenotyping RSA non-destructively by capturing root imagery over time. Precisely segmenting roots from the soil in MR imagery is a critical step in studying RSA features. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale dataset of plant root images captured by MR technology. In total, there are over 72K RGB root images across six different species including cotton, papaya, peanut, sesame, sunflower, and switchgrass in the dataset. The images span a variety of conditions including varied root age, root structures, soil types, and depths under the soil surface. All of the images have been annotated with weak image-level labels indicating whether each image contains roots or not. The image-level labels can be used to support weakly supervised learning in plant root segmentation tasks. In addition, 63K images have been manually annotated to generate pixel-level binary masks indicating whether each pixel corresponds to root or not. These pixel-level binary masks can be used as ground truth for supervised learning in semantic segmentation tasks. By introducing this dataset, we aim to facilitate the automatic segmentation of roots and the research of RSA with deep learning and other image analysis algorithms.

Xu, Weihuang↗

Improving Building Footprint Extraction Using NAIP and 3DEP Lidar Derived Features with Deep Learning

Accurate building footprint extraction is critical for applications ranging from population estimation to disaster management. Although optical imagery provides detailed spectral information, it often struggles with shadows, occlusions, and background clutter in dense urban environments. Lidar data, by contrast, offer precise elevation and structural attributes but face challenges such as variable point density and noise. This study integrates multispectral imagery from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) with lidar-derived feature height and intensity from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) to improve footprint extraction using a U-Net–based deep learning model. A six-band input stack (RGB, near-infrared, height, intensity) was developed, normalized, and tiled for training and evaluation against Microsoft Global Building Footprints (GBF). Results from the Houston, TX test site show that the six-band model achieved a precision of 0.86, recall of 0.88, F1 score of 0.87, and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) of 0.76, consistently outperforming four-band baselines by reducing false positives while maintaining sensitivity. Predictions on withheld Houston tiles confirmed strong within-region generalization, yielded a precision of 0.78, recall of 0.81, F1 score of 0.79, and IoU of 0.66. Qualitative analysis further revealed limitations stemming from both training label quality and vegetation–building confusion. These findings demonstrate the complementary value of integrating spectral and structural information for robust building footprint extraction and how domain adaptation strategies can be used to enhance cross-regional transferability.

Liu, Jung Kuan [United States Geological Survey (U↗