FORMSpoT: A Decade of Tree-Level, Country-Scale Forest Monitoring

TL;DR

FORMSpoT offers a decade-long, high-resolution forest monitoring system at the tree level across France, significantly improving disturbance detection accuracy and enabling detailed forest dynamics analysis for climate change mitigation.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel hierarchical transformer-based method for annual forest canopy height mapping and disturbance detection at 1.5 m resolution, outperforming existing products.

Findings

Substantially better disturbance detection accuracy, especially in mountainous forests.

Order of magnitude improvement in F1-score over benchmarks.

Enables detailed analysis of forest management and early decline signals.

Abstract

The recent decline of the European forest carbon sink highlights the need for spatially explicit and frequently updated forest monitoring tools. Yet, existing satellite-based disturbance products remain too coarse to detect changes at the scale of individual trees, typically below 100 m$^{2}$. Here, we introduce FORMSpoT (Forest Mapping with SPOT Time series), a decade-long (2014-2024) nationwide mapping of forest canopy height at 1.5 m resolution, together with annual disturbance polygons (FORMSpoT-$\Delta$) covering mainland France. Canopy heights were derived from annual SPOT-6/7 composites using a hierarchical transformer model (PVTv2) trained on high-resolution airborne laser scanning (ALS) data. To enable robust change detection across heterogeneous acquisitions, we developed a dedicated post-processing pipeline combining co-registration and spatio-temporal total variation denoising. Validation against ALS revisits across 19 sites and 5,087 National Forest Inventory plots shows that FORMSpoT-$\Delta$ substantially outperforms existing disturbance products. In mountainous forests, where disturbances are small and spatially fragmented, FORMSpoT-$\Delta$ achieves an F1-score of 0.44, representing an order of magnitude higher than existing benchmarks. By enabling tree-level monitoring of forest dynamics at national scale, FORMSpoT-$\Delta$ provides a unique tool to analyze management practices, detect early signals of forest decline, and better quantify carbon losses from subtle disturbances such as thinning or selective logging. These results underscore the critical importance of sustaining very high-resolution satellite missions like SPOT and open-data initiatives such as DINAMIS for monitoring forests under climate change.