Forest age estimation in northern Arkhangelsk region based on machine learning pipeline on Sentinel-2 and auxiliary data

Tree age is one of the key characteristics of a forest, along with tree species and height. It affects management decisions of forest owners and allows researchers to analyze environmental characteristics in support of sustainable development. Although forest age is of primary significance, it can be unknown for remote areas and large territories. Currently, remote sensing (RS) data supports rapid information gathering for wide territories. To automate RS data processing and estimate forest characteristics, machine learning (ML) approaches are applied. Although there are different data sources that can be used as features in ML models, there is no unified strategy on how to prepare a dataset and define a training task to estimate forest age. Therefore, in this work, we aim to conduct a comprehensive study on forest age estimation using remote sensing observations of the Sentinel-2 satellite and two ML-based approaches for forestry inventory data, namely stand-based and pixel-based. We chose the CatBoost algorithm to assess these two approaches. To establish the robustness of the pipeline, an in-depth analysis is conducted, embracing diverse scenarios incorporating dominant species information, tree height, Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and vegetation indices. We performed experiments on forests in the northern Arkhangelsk region and obtained the best Mean Absolute Error (MAE) result of 7 years in the case of the stand-based approach and 6 years in the case of the pixel-based approach. These results are achieved for all available input data such as spectral satellites bands, vegetation indices, and auxiliary forest characteristics (dominant species and height). However, when only spectral bands are used, the MAE metric is the same both for per-pixel and per-stand approaches and equals 11 years. It was also shown that, despite high correlation between forest age and height, only height can not be used for accurate age estimation: the MAE increases to 18 and 26 years for per-pixel and per-stand approaches, respectively. The conducted study might be useful for further investigation of forest ecosystems through remote sensing observations.