FORMSpoT: A Decade of Tree-Level, Country-Scale Forest Monitoring
This provides a tool for researchers and policymakers to monitor forest dynamics at tree-level scale, enabling analysis of management practices and carbon loss quantification, though it is incremental in improving resolution and accuracy.
The paper tackles the problem of coarse satellite-based forest monitoring by introducing FORMSpoT, a decade-long, nationwide mapping of forest canopy height at 1.5 m resolution with annual disturbance detection, achieving an F1-score of 0.44 in mountainous forests, which is an order of magnitude higher than existing benchmarks.
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-$Δ$) 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-$Δ$ substantially outperforms existing disturbance products. In mountainous forests, where disturbances are small and spatially fragmented, FORMSpoT-$Δ$ 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-$Δ$ 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.