2025/06/18 by Yue Wang, Shi Li, Wang, Di +1 · 1 citation
Engineering · Environmental Science · #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Forest Biomass Utilization and Management #Forest ecology and management #Remote Sensing and LiDAR Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.15577
openalex publication_date 2025/06/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Estimating forest above-ground biomass (AGB) is crucial for assessing carbon storage and supporting sustainable forest management. Quantitative Structural Model (QSM) offers a non-destructive approach to AGB estimation through 3D tree structural reconstruction. However, current QSM methods face significant limitations, as they are primarily designed for individual trees,depend on high-quality point cloud data from terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), and also require multiple pre-processing steps that hinder scalability and practical deployment. This study presents a novel unified framework that enables end-to-end processing of large-scale point clouds using an innovative graph-based pipeline. The proposed approach seamlessly integrates tree segmentation,leaf-wood separation and 3D skeletal reconstruction through dedicated graph operations including pathing and abstracting for tree topology reasoning. Comprehensive validation was conducted on datasets with varying leaf conditions (leaf-on and leaf-off), spatial scales (tree- and plot-level), and data sources (TLS and UAV-based laser scanning, ULS). Experimental results demonstrate strong performance under challenging conditions, particularly in leaf-on scenarios (~20% relative error) and low-density ULS datasets with partial coverage (~30% relative error). These findings indicate that the proposed framework provides a robust and scalable solution for large-scale, non-destructive AGB estimation. It significantly reduces dependency on specialized pre-processing tools and establishes ULS as a viable alternative to TLS. To our knowledge, this is the first method capable of enabling seamless, end-to-end 3D tree reconstruction at operational scales. This advancement substantially improves the feasibility of QSM-based AGB estimation, paving the way for broader applications in forest inventory and climate change research.