DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17650958
title: Paracou trees

description: Tree Crown Dataset Overview



251125_crowns_zenodo2016.gpkg is the Zenodo-ready slice of the Paracou manual crown database that captures every crown polygon valid on the 19 September 2016 airborne campaign

The crowns originate from hand-drawn delineations that were iteratively validated in the field between 2015 and 2023 to provide ground-truth for segmentation, species labelling, and long-term phenology tracking.

4599 individual tree crowns.

Geometry is stored in metres in UTM Zone 22 N (EPSG:32622).


Provenance & Processing



Internal crowns (within plots) came from 230322_crowns_id.gpkg, which itself aggregates the 2022 core dataset with fully field-checked additions for plots P5 and P14. External crowns (trees identified outside plots were read from 221019_externals_id.gpkg.

The internal crowns are checked against with the best available botanical information prior to the scan year by joining against CIRAD/INRA inventory tables and the CNES plot updates through 2021, ensuring that every fid_1 inherits the latest pre-2016 census species name, DBH, and alive/dead flags.

After binding the labelled internals with the formatted externals, the script filters to crowns whose StartDate is before (or equal to) the scan date and whose EndDate is missing or later, i.e. crowns that were still valid in September 2016. 


Attributes & Data Content



Each feature retains the polygon geometry plus three key fields:



fid_1: the immutable tree identifier that links temporally distinct crowns to the same individual.

Site: the forest site (just Paracou for this release).

GroundValid: boolean flag indicating whether the crown-trunk match was verified in the field; TRUE crowns have an associated TrunkMatch score in the parent database and are considered high-trust training data).



This export intentionally keeps only the identifiers plus the geometry to minimise sensitive inventory attributes. Users needing botanical or confidence fields can request.

Note, a small fractions crowns, while well aligned aligned with the imagery, may overestimate crown area as they were scaled to match a later image.


RGB Orthomosaic



Paracou_RGB_2016_10cm.tif is the full-scene 2016 airborne RGB orthomosaic used as a visual base for crown delineation and validation.

The GeoTIFF is stored as a BigTIFF (to pass the 4 GB limit) with four 8‑bit bands—red, green, blue, and an unassociated alpha channel. No compression is applied, so the 5.3 GB footprint reflects the full 35 000 × 40 000 pixel raster.

Each pixel represents 0.10 m on the ground.

The extent is roughly 3.5 km (east–west) by 4.0 km (north–south), covering about 14 km² centered on the Paracou study area. Bounding box [284 362.126 m, 287 862.126 m] × [580 621.538 m, 584 621.538 m] in RGFG95 / UTM Zone 22N (EPSG:2972).

Flight altitude: 800m

Sensor: IXA180 Phase One

The imagery was orthorectifed using TerraPhoto to the Canopy surface model derived from simultaneously acquired lidar data.
description: Data collection in French Guiana was supported by CNES and ONF (Office National des Forêts) who funded the 2016 RGB data over Paracou and Labex CEBA (ANR-10-LABX-25) who funded the field validation of manual crown segmentations as part of the Phenobs project.