ForestSplat: Proof-of-Concept for a Scalable and High-Fidelity Forestry Mapping Tool Using 3D Gaussian Splatting
Belal Shaheen, Matthew David Zane, Bach-Thuan Bui, Shubham, Tianyuan Huang, Manuel Merello, Ben Scheelk, Steve Crooks, Michael Wu
Source abstract
Accurate, scalable forestry insights are critical for implementing carbon credit-based reforestation initiatives and data-driven ecosystem management. However, existing forest quantification methods face significant challenges: hand measurement is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and difficult to trust; satellite imagery is not accurate enough; and airborne LiDAR remains prohibitively expensive at scale. In this work, we introduce ForestSplat: an accurate and scalable reforestation monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) system built from consumer-grade drone footage and 3D Gaussian Splatting. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we map and reconstruct a 200-acre mangrove restoration project in the Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. ForestSplat produces an average mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.17 m and mean error (ME) of 0.007 m compared to canopy height maps derived from airborne LiDAR scans, using 100× cheaper hardware. We hope that our proposed framework can support the advancement of accurate and scalable forestry modeling with consumer-grade drones and computer vision, facilitating a new gold standard for reforestation MRV.
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