Miñano-Mañero, Alba2024-11-272024-11-272024-10Miñano-Mañero, Alba (2024). "Trees of green : constructing panels of tree canopy from aerial imagery". REM Working paper series, nº 0352/20242184-108Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/95706This paper develops a fully-automated workflow for constructing panels of tree canopy from high-resolution multispectral imagery with limited near-infrared (NIR) training data. The proposed workflow utilizes the tree-pixel detection algorithm developed by Yang, Wu, Praun, and Ma (2009) and Bosch (2020) on a large set of U.S. urban areas but modifies it by creating automatic ground-truth masks through various visual graphics techniques that leverage modern high-resolution NIR data. By matching colors across different imagery periods, the workflow predicts tree presence in older images without NIR data, using the recent images with NIR data. Using a subset of cities that represent the different U.S. climate regions, I quantify the effectiveness of the workflow by implementing the algorithm without pre-processing in the creation of ground-truth masks, without equalizing colors across periods, and using a universal model for all areas. The comparison shows that my workflow is the option that leads to better results in terms of accuracy, recall, and precision.engaerial imagerytree detectionnear-infrared lightpanel dataworking paper