deadtrees.earth - Crowdsourced Drone Data for Global Tree Mortality Maps (Clemens Mosig)

The Open-Earth Monitor Global Workshop 2026 "Next-Generation EO & GeoAI Built on Openness and Distributed Data" 7-9 October 2026, Barcelona, Spain https://earthmonitor.org/global-workshop-2026/ Elevated forest disturbances and excess tree mortality are increasingly reported worldwide. Yet existing assessments are either based on patchy terrestrial observations or on large-scale satellite products, which are limited in resolution to pixel-level, binary tree loss detection. This leaves a blind spot on fine-scale disturbances where only a few trees are declining in an otherwise intact canopy. In this talk, we give an overview of the deadtrees.earth initiative and how we leveraged crowdsourced drone data to build globally generalizing models for mapping tree mortality and disturbances from drones, airplanes, and Sentinel-2. This talk will further go into details of our upscaling approach where centimeter-scale drone data is leveraged to calibrate a model that processes multi-year Sentinel-2 time series around the globe.