Pathfinder superplots

This Zenodo repository accompanies the "PathFinder superplots" data paper. The data paper should be referred to for a comprehensive description of the available data and measurement protocols. These superplotsplots were collected with the intent to support harmonised, transparent, and partly automated forest in-situ data collection across European forest.

The work focuses on combining traditional forest field measurements with mobile laser scanning (MLS) and monitoring tools for traditional forest inventory and biodiveristy indicators (structure, deadwood, regeneration).

The protocol supports the collection of tree-level variables such as diameter at breast height, tree height, tree species, tree position, regeneration, deadwood, and canopy structure. These data are intended to improve forest monitoring and provide high-quality in-situ reference information for Earth observation calibration and validation.

Field measurements were conducted during 2023–2024 in 27 superplots distributed across Norway, Spain, Slovenia, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, covering 13 of the 14 European Forest Categories. In total, the campaign measured 3,686 trees across 45 species, together with regeneration, deadwood, MLS point clouds, and, in selected countries, biodiversity data from bioacoustics 🐦 and camera traps 🦌.

The MLS data are georeferenced and further processed with some of the stae-of-the-art AI models for forest computer 3D vision, including the instance and semantic segmentation using ForAInet (Xiang et al. 2024), classified according to species using DetailView (Puliti et al. 2025) and with DBH measured using TreeDetector (Rehush et al. 2023).

🌍 Countries and 🌲🌳 forest types covered