ECHOSAT: Estimating Canopy Height Over Space and Time

Forest monitoring is critical for climate change mitigation. However, existing global tree height maps only provide static snapshots and do not capture temporal forest dynamics, which are essential for accurate carbon accounting. We introduce ECHOSAT, a global and temporally consistent tree height map at 10\meter resolution spanning multiple years, which accurately quantifies tree growth and disturbances over time. To this end, we resort to multi-sensor satellite data to train a vision transformer model, which performs pixel-level temporal regression. A self-supervised growth loss regularizes the predictions to follow growth curves that are in line with natural tree development, including gradual height increases over time, but also abrupt declines due to forest loss events such as fires. Our evaluation further shows that our model improves state-of-the-art accuracies in the context of single-year predictions. ECHOSAT can be accessed here: https://echosatanonymous.projects.earthengine.app/view/echosat-temporal.