Deep Pre-trained Time Series Features for Tree Species Classification in the Dutch Forest Inventory

Abstract: National Forest Inventory (NFI)s serve as the primary source of forest information, providing crucial tree species distribution data. However, maintaining these inventories requires labor-intensive on-site campaigns. Remote sensing approaches, particularly when combined with machine learning, offer opportunities to update NFIs more frequently and at larger scales. While the use of Satellite Image Time Series has proven effective for distinguishing tree species through seasonal canopy reflectance patterns, current approaches rely primarily on Random Forest classifiers with hand-designed features and phenology-based metrics. Using deep features from an available pre-trained remote sensing foundation models offers a complementary strategy. These pre-trained models leverage unannotated global data and are meant to used for general-purpose applications and can then be efficiently fine-tuned with smaller labeled datasets for specific classification tasks. This work systematically investigates how deep features improve tree species classification accuracy in the Netherlands with few annotated data. Data-wise, we extracted time-series data from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and ERA5 satellites data and SRTM data using Google Earth Engine. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuning a publicly available remote sensing time series foundation model outperforms the current state-of-the-art in NFI classification in the Netherlands by a large margin of up to 10% across all datasets. This demonstrates that classic hand-defined harmonic features are too simple for this task and highlights the potential of using deep AI features for data-limited application like NFI classification. By leveraging openly available satellite data and pre-trained models, this approach significantly improves classification accuracy compared to traditional methods and can effectively complement existing forest inventory processes.