At A Glance: Forest Intelligence Modernization
- The Agreement: Historic partnership between USACE ERDC and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).
- The Tech: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) powered by high-performance computing.
- Data Scale: Uses “ground truth” from 355,000+ plots and 17 trillion pixels of satellite data.
- Military Impact: Enables high-definition 3D mapping of vegetation in “access-denied” areas for concealment and routing.
- Civilian Impact: Superior data for predicting wildfire behavior, disaster risks, and carbon stocks.
Thanks to a historic agreement between the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), a foundational dataset has been created to bolster the nation’s forests.
ERDC’s Environmental Laboratory (EL) Forest Ecosystem Dynamic (FED) team is partnering with USFS’s R&D Forest Inventory and Analysis Program to establish a collaborative framework that strengthens forest structure and composition modeling capabilities for both agencies. This one-of-a-kind agreement positions ERDC’s FED team as the only Defense R&D team with access to the necessary measured forest data, providing the U.S. Army and Joint Force a decision advantage in vegetated environments.
“Our team is utilizing the incredible work the USFS has created to monitor and evaluate forests in the United States to enable global modeling at an unprecedented level of accuracy and depth of information,” said Nathan Beane, FED team lead and senior research forester for EL.
Artificial intelligence (AI) merged with machine learning (ML) powers this dataset. ERDC FED leverages the two, along with High Performance Computing Modernization Program capabilities and plot-level data throughout North America to produce the data needed to advance capabilities and inform model training for global-scale application.
“Our goal for this project is to provide tools to geospatial analysts to predict forested and other vegetated characteristics anywhere in the world,” said Beane. “Therefore, we want to enable the capability to predict vegetation structure and composition in places we cannot access by using data from places that we can.”
Plot-level information from more than 355,000 locations across the United States will fuel the prediction power of modeling efforts. Gabe Powell, a contracted senior research geoscientist, simplified the role the technology plays: “Think of it like building a high-definition, 3D map of every forest on Earth without having to visit every tree.”
The framework is a game-changer for the U.S military, equipping the Warfighter with data to empower its mission. Civilians benefit, too, as the frame exposes forest health and enables the civilian sector to predict forest activity.
“Current vegetation data is often limited to basic landcover maps. For the first time, we’re providing data on forest structure and composition at 30-meter resolution. This directly informs mission planning for everything from communications and concealment to vehicle routing,” said Powell.
From this framework research comes the global forest and rangeland toolkit—a product that gives commanders an actionable vegetation knowledge superiority gap that hasn’t existed since the Cold War. While the toolkit is in production, the FED team has a phased delivery schedule in place for final deliverables and has begun delivering interim capabilities that meet the Army’s needs.
