Related papers: Biomass Estimation and Uncertainty Quantification …
In circular plot sampling, trees within a given distance from the sample plot location constitute a sample, which is used to infer characteristics of interest for the forest area. If the sample is collected using a technical device located…
High resolution geospatial data are challenging because standard geostatistical models based on Gaussian processes are known to not scale to large data sizes. While progress has been made towards methods that can be computed more…
Forestry is a major industry in many parts of the world. It relies on forest inventory, which consists of measuring tree attributes. We propose to use 3D mapping, based on the iterative closest point algorithm, to automatically measure tree…
The goal of this research was to develop and examine the performance of a geostatistical coregionalization modeling approach for combining field inventory measurements, strip samples of airborne lidar and Landsat-based remote sensing data…
Tree-size distribution is one of the most investigated subjects in plant population biology. The forestry literature reports that tree-size distribution trajectories vary across different stands and/or species, while the metabolic scaling…
The estimation of unknown parameters in nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) offers valuable insights across a wide range of scientific domains. In this work, we focus on estimating plant root parameters in the Richards equation,…
Tree structured graphical models are powerful at expressing long range or hierarchical dependency among many variables, and have been widely applied in different areas of computer science and statistics. However, existing methods for…
The ratio of two densities provides a direct characterization of their differences. We consider the two-sample comparison problem by estimating this ratio given i.i.d. observations from two distributions. To this end, we propose additive…
The three-dimensional structures of individual trees are important pieces of information necessary to understand the effect of trees on urban environments. In this study, we demonstrate a method for estimating the leaf area density (LAD)…
Regular measurement of carbon stock in the world's forests is critical for carbon accounting and reporting under national and international climate initiatives, and for scientific research, but has been largely limited in scalability and…
Regression trees and random forests are popular and effective non-parametric estimators in practical applications. A recent paper by Athey and Wager shows that the random forest estimate at any point is asymptotically Gaussian; in this…
In the face of uncertain biological response to climate change and the many critiques concerning model complexity it is increasingly important to develop predictive mechanistic frameworks that capture the dominant features of ecological…
Tree canopy height is one of the most important indicators of forest biomass, productivity, and species diversity, but it is challenging to measure accurately from the ground and from space. Here, we used a U-Net model adapted for…
Spatially explicit quantification of forest biomass is important for forest-health monitoring and carbon accounting. Direct field measurements of biomass are laborious and expensive, typically limiting their spatial and temporal sampling…
This work develops formal statistical inference procedures for machine learning ensemble methods. Ensemble methods based on bootstrapping, such as bagging and random forests, have improved the predictive accuracy of individual trees, but…
A new synthesis scheme is proposed to effectively generate a random vector with prescribed joint density that induces a (latent) Gaussian tree structure. The quality of synthesis is measured by total variation distance between the…
Parameter estimation is a major challenge in computational modeling of biological processes. This is especially the case in image-based modeling where the inherently quantitative output of the model is measured against image data, which is…
Accurate forest canopy height estimation is essential for evaluating aboveground biomass and carbon stock dynamics, supporting ecosystem monitoring services like timber provisioning, climate change mitigation, and biodiversity conservation.…
Almost all scientific data have uncertainties originating from different sources. Gaussian process regression (GPR) models are a natural way to model data with Gaussian-distributed uncertainties. GPR also has the benefit of reducing I/O…
We introduce a novel way to combine boosting with Gaussian process and mixed effects models. This allows for relaxing, first, the zero or linearity assumption for the prior mean function in Gaussian process and grouped random effects models…