Global Initiative

The Initiative

Global climate change is affecting forest ecosystems at an accelerating rate, putting pressure on forest resilience and biodiversity. Monitoring tree species distribution at scale is critical to designing policies that protect ecosystem services and guide forest management under a changing climate.

TreeAI addresses this challenge by developing deep learning models for automatic tree species detection in high-resolution aerial and drone imagery. We are building the first open, community-driven global database of annotated tree crowns, providing the training foundation these models require. Contributions come from research groups worldwide and span five continents.

The outputs of this initiative, including the database, trained models, and benchmark evaluations, are released openly to support improved forest inventory, targeted management planning, and research on forest resilience. The goal is the first generalizable model for individual tree species identification that scales across geographic regions.