Monitoring the Urban Forest with Auto Arborist

Abstract: Urban forests provide significant benefits to urban societies. However, planning and maintaining these forests is expensive. One particularly costly aspect of urban forest management is monitoring the existing trees in a city: e.g., tracking tree locations, species, and health. Monitoring efforts are currently based on tree censuses built by human experts, costing cities millions of dollars per census and thus collected infrequently. In this talk, we will discuss efforts to automate urban forest monitoring using a combination of aerial and street-level images in cities across North America as part of the Auto Arborist project, including the development of a benchmark dataset that joins public tree censuses from 23 cities with a large collection of street level and aerial imagery covering 2.5M trees and more than 300 genera, investigation of geographic distribution shifts and priors induced by urban tree planting policy, and recent efforts to move beyond species mapping to understand tree structure in 3D and over time.

Bio: Dr. Sara Beery is the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Professor in the MIT Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making. She was previously a visiting researcher at Google, working on large-scale urban forest monitoring as part of the Auto Arborist project. She received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech in 2022, where she was advised by Pietro Perona and awarded the Amori Doctoral Prize for her thesis. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including geospatial and temporal domain shift, learning from imperfect data, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She partners with industry, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies to deploy her methods in the wild worldwide. She works toward increasing the diversity and accessibility of academic research in artificial intelligence through interdisciplinary capacity building and education, and has founded the AI for Conservation slack community, serves as the Biodiversity Community Lead for Climate Change AI, and founded and directs the Summer Workshop on Computer Vision Methods for Ecology.