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Sciences and Exploration Directorate
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Mapping vegetation height in Alaska with an Earth Observation Foundation Model (EOFM) and commercial spaceborne imagery

We demonstrated the ability of frontier Earth Observing Foundation Models to detect subtle vegetation structure changes in Alaska.

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Data/Image Computer Models
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Although the far northern latitudes are changing faster than anywhere on earth, the geographic vastness, sparse vegetation, and subtle but meaningful vegetation structure changes make this area notoriously difficult to measure and model. Many earth-observing (EO) computer vision vegetation height models only predict to the nearest 1 meter, masking the subtle (~0.1 m) but important vegetation height changes typical in the boreal-tundra gradient. We successfully fine-tuned a frontier open source EO Foundation model trained on 493 million high resolution commercial satellite images to address this gap in resolving fine-scaled vegetation structures. This work was collaboration with scientists JJ Frost and Matt Macander from Alaska Biological Research, Inc.