Ecological Informatics 63 (2021) 101302

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Ecological Informatics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolinf

Accurate mapping of Brazil nut trees (Bertholletia excelsa) in Amazonian

forests using WorldView-3 satellite images and convolutional
neural networks
Matheus Pinheiro Ferreira a, *, Rodolfo Georjute Lotte b, Francisco V. D’Elia b,
Christos Stamatopoulos b, Do-Hyung Kim c, Adam R. Benjamin d
a
Cartographic Engineering Department, Military Institute of Engineering (IME), Praça Gen. Tibúrcio 80, 22290-270 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
b
Bioverse Tecnologia e Inovação em Monitoramento Ambiental, Alameda dos Anapurus 1473, 04087-005 São Paulo, SP, Brazil
c
Office of Innovation, UNICEF, New York, NY 10017, USA
d
School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences, Univ. of Florida Geomatics Program, Fort Lauderdale R.E.C., 3205 College Ave., Fort Lauderdale, FL 33314, United
States of America

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The commercialization of Brazil nuts, seeds of Bertholletia excelsa Bonpl. (Lecythidaceae), represents one of the
Deep learning main income-generation activities for local and indigenous people from the Brazilian Amazon region. Because
Tree species discrimination trees of B. excelsa grow and bear fruit almost exclusively in natural forests, information on their spatial distri­
Amazon
bution is crucial for nut harvest planning. However, this information is difficult to obtain with traditional ap­
Very-high-resolution
proaches such as ground-based surveys. Here, we show the potential of convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
and WorldView-3 satellite images (pixel size = 30 cm) to map individual tree crowns (ITCs) and groves of
B. excelsa in Amazonian forests. First, we manually outlined B. excelsa ITCs in the WorldView-3 images using
field-acquired geolocation information. Then, based on ITC boundaries, we sequentially extracted image patches
and selected 80% of them for training and 20% for testing. We trained the DeepLabv3+ architecture with three
backbones: ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and MobileNetV2. The average producer’s accuracy was 93.87 ± 0.85%,
93.89 ± 1.6% and 93.47 ± 3.6% for ResNet-18, ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. We then developed a
new random patch extraction training strategy and assessed how a reduction in the percentage of training
patches impacted the classification accuracy. To illustrate the robustness of the new training strategy, similar F1-
scores were achieved whether 80% or 10% of the total number of patches were used to train the CNN model. By
analyzing the feature maps derived from ResNet-18, we found that the shadow of emergent B. excelsa trees are
important for their discrimination. Geometric distortions in the WorldView-3 images resulting from extreme off-
nadir viewing angles compromise the presence of shadows, thus potentially hampering B. excelsa detection. Our
results show that ITCs and groves of B. excelsa can be mapped by integrating CNNs and very-high-resolution
(VHR) satellite images, paving the way for monitoring this important tree species in large tracts of Amazo­
nian forests.

1. Introduction
The Brazil nut is one of the most important non-timber forest prod­
ucts in South America (Peres et al., 2003). It is extracted from Bertholletia
excelsa Bonpl. (Lecythidaceae) trees that grow and bear fruit almost
exclusively in natural forests rather than in plantations. Brazil nuts are
an essential dietary item for local populations in Amazonia and are also
traded in considerable volumes. In 2019, Brazil produced 32.9 thousand
tons of Brazil nuts, which represented 11.1% of the economic profit
generated by exploring natural plant resources (IBGE, 2019). In addition
to the nuts’ economic importance, the wood of B. excelsa trees has a high
value in the market, which motivates illegal logging activities, given
that the species is considered threatened by the Brazilian Ministry of
Environment (MMA, 2019).
Management and conservation efforts of B. excelsa trees in Amazo­
nian forests can benefit from information regarding its spatial

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: matheus@ime.eb.br (M.P. Ferreira).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101302
Received 17 February 2021; Received in revised form 9 April 2021; Accepted 9 April 2021
Available online 15 April 2021
1574-9541/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
M.P. Ferreira et al.
distribution. For example, one can previously locate productive groves,
thus supporting the planning of nut collection. Conservation strategies
such as establishing protected areas can be guided by spatially contin­
uous data of B. excelsa occurrence in large tracts of Amazonian forests.
However, knowledge of B. excelsa trees’ spatial distribution is tradi­
tionally obtained with ground-based surveys that involve high costs and
logistic efforts. An encouraging way to obtain spatially explicit infor­
mation on tree species occurrence over large areas is by integrating
remote sensing images and machine learning methods.
Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a type of deep
learning method, have been hailed as a promising approach for identi­
fying tree species in remote sensing images, especially in very-high-
resolution (VHR) data (Kattenborn et al., 2021). CNNs are designed to
automatically extract spatial patterns (e.g., shapes, edges, texture) of
images using a set of convolution and pooling operations (Zhang et al.,
2016), hence learning object-specific characteristics. In the case of tree
species, such characteristics are mainly related to the canopy structure:
the arrangement of leaves and branches in the crown or color patterns
caused by flowering events. CNNs designed for semantic segmentation
can simultaneously classify and detect individual tree crowns (ITCs),
thus avoiding object-based approaches that require an ITC delineation
step before classification. ITC delineation is a challenging task, partic­
ularly in tropical forests in which the tree crowns usually overlap and
have highly variable sizes and shapes (Tochon et al., 2015; Wagner
et al., 2018; G Braga et al., 2020).
Several studies have demonstrated the potential of CNNs for map­
ping trees species in urban areas (Hartling et al., 2019; Lobo Torres et al.,
2020; Santos et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2020) or monoculture planta­
tions, especially oil palm (Dong et al., 2020; Li et al., 2017; Liu et al.,
2021; Zheng et al., 2020; Zheng et al., 2021). In forest environments, the
majority of studies were performed in temperate regions using RGB
images (Onishi and Ise, 2021; Schiefer et al., 2020), hyperspectral im­
ages (Fricker et al., 2019; Liao et al., 2018; Nezami et al., 2020; Trier
et al., 2018) or light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data (Weinstein
et al., 2020) acquired by sensors onboard unoccupied aerial vehicles
(UAVs, refer to Joyce et al. (2021)) and airplanes. Images collected by
UAV-borne or airborne sensors have a high spatial resolution (pixel size
< 50 cm) but are typically limited to small spatial extents.
Conversely, VHR spaceborne sensors can combine high spatial res­
olution with extensive area coverage. Wagner et al. (2019) used
WorldView-2 images (pixel size = 50 cm) and the U-net (Ronneberger
et al., 2015) convolutional network to map trees of Cecropia hololeuca,
an indicator species of disturbance in tropical forests. The results
showed that the U-net network produced fine-grained segmentation of
C. hololeuca trees with an overall accuracy of 97%. Wagner et al. (2020a)
used WorldView-2 and WorldView-3 (pixel size = 30 cm) and U-net to
map the spatial distribution of the species Tibouchina pulchra and assess
the regeneration history of Brazilian Atlantic Forest fragments. Trees of
T. pulchra were segmented with 98.92% accuracy. The high classifica­
tion accuracy (<95%) reported by the studies mentioned above can be
explained by the remarkable characteristics of C. hololeuca and
T. pulchra trees. The former has a large round (>50 cm in diameter) and
bright gray peltate leaf, and the latter undergoes mass-flowering with
purple and pink blossoms that enable its detection.
Some studies performed in tropical forests used CNNs to discriminate
palm trees in VHR images and reported high accuracy rates (>90%). For
example, Wagner et al. (2020b) performed a regional mapping of can­
opy palms in Amazonian forests with GeoEye-1 images (pixel size = 50
cm) and the U-net model, achieving 95.5% of overall accuracy. Morales
et al. (2018) discriminated palm trees of Mauritia flexuosa in UAV images
acquired over swamps in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, reporting
98.1% of classification accuracy. Ferreira et al. (2020) developed a deep
learning-based method for automatically detecting three Amazonian
palm species in UAV images, achieving an average producer’s accuracy
of 87.8 ± 4.4%. The morphological characteristics of palm crowns can
explain the success of CNNs. Palms usually have the leaves concentrated
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Ecological Informatics 63 (2021) 101302
at the top of the stem. They are divided into several leaflets along the
leaf rachis, resulting in a peculiar starry pattern in remote sensing
images.
CNNs have only been recently employed in vegetation remote
sensing, with most studies published in the last two years (Kattenborn
et al., 2021). Little is known regarding the potential of CNNs to
discriminate among tropical tree species that have a vast diversity of
canopy architectures (Hallé et al., 1978). The few existing studies used
hyperspectral images acquired by UAVs (e.g., Sothe et al. (2020)).
However, these images require extensive calibration and complicated
preprocessing steps, which limits their use to specialists. Moreover, a
knowledge gap exists between suitable CNN training strategies for tree
species classification and different backbones for feature extraction.
This study seeks to contribute knowledge regarding the potential of
CNNs to map B. excelsa trees in Amazonian forests using WorldView-3
satellite images. We bring new insights into model training strategies
and backbones for feature extraction. We presented an approach that
can map the spatial distribution of individual trees and groves of
B. excelsa in large tracts of Amazonian forests.
2. Materials
2.1. Study area
The study area is located in southern Pará State, southeastern Bra­
zilian Amazon, within the Kayapó indigenous land (Fig. 1). The Kayapó
territory, a regularized area of 3,284,005 ha, harbors more than 8580
indigenous people (IBGE, 2010) from several ethnicities or subgroups at
the eastern part of the Amazon biome. Given that the Xingu River crosses
the territory and other numerous small streams run through the inner
forest, there are estimated to be 19 known indigenous communities and
more than five isolated ones (Ricardo et al., 2000).
The Kayapó territory lies on a transition zone between the Amazon
forest and Cerrado (savanna) biomes in central Brazil, where seasonally-
dry forests dominate the landscape (Salm, 2004). The relief is charac­
terized by rocky ridges that vary between 100 and 500 m in altitude, and
the climate is humid and hot, with a dry season that spans from May to
August. The region receives less than 1700 mm yr− 1 of rain and has a
solid dry season of as many as 100 rainless days yr− 1 (Zimmerman et al.,
2001). The mean annual temperature is 25.8◦ C and ranges from 18◦ to
35◦ C.
2.2. WorldView-3 images and preprocessing
The WorldView-3 satellite was launched by DigitalGlobe© on 13
August 2014, carrying one of the most advanced commercials, VHR
sensors. With a circular sun-synchronous orbit and flying at an altitude
of 617 km, WorldView-3 collects eight visible to near-infrared (VNIR,
400–1040 nm) bands at 1.2 m resolution, eight shortwave infrared
(SWIR, 1210–2365 nm) bands at 3.7 m resolution, and a panchromatic
band with 30 cm spatial resolution.
Cloud-free WorldView-3 images were acquired over the area of in­
terest on 19 June 2016, at a maximum off-nadir view angle of 16.07◦ ,
encompassing an area of about 1071 km2 (see images within the red
polygon of Fig. 1). For this study, we used the Red (630–690 nm), Green
(510–580 nm), Blue (450–510 nm), and panchromatic (450–800 nm)
bands. These bands were provided by DigitalGlobe© as the standard
LV2A product (DigitalGlobe, 2016), which is radiometrically corrected
and georeferenced to World Geodetic System (WGS) 1984 datum and
the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) zone 22S projection.
Through pan-sharpening, the RGB bands were merged to the
panchromatic band to obtain a single high-resolution RGB image at 30
cm resolution. We used Brovey’s pansharpening algorithm (Hallada and
Cox, 1983), available in the open-source Geospatial Data Abstraction
Library (GDAL) as the gdal_pansharpen.py script. The weights used
by the algorithm for the computation of the pseudo panchromatic value
M.P. Ferreira et al.
Fig. 1. Location of the study area in Brazil. (a) Pará state and indigenous territories. (b) Study area located within the Kayapó reserve. (c) True color composition of a
WorldView-3 scene (pixel size = 30 cm) showing individual tree crowns (yellow polygons) of Brazil nut trees (Bertholletia excelsa). (For interpretation of the ref­
erences to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
were 0.005, 0.142, and 0.209 for the RGB bands (Parente and Pepe,
2017), respectively.
2.3. Field data
In 2010, we carried out a fieldwork campaign to geolocate B. excelsa
groves. We visited these groves with previous knowledge from the local
communities and registered the geographic coordinates of 802 points
using a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) device (Garmin 65CSx
©). During the fieldwork, the GNSS accuracy was 5 ± 5 m. Thus, the
GNSS points do not represent the exact location of an ITC. Most geo­
located groves had trees with a large diameter at breast height (DBH) (>
60 cm) and thus a large crown (see Blanchard et al. (2016) for more
information on the relationship between DBH and crown area). We
could quickly identify these trees in the VHR WorldView-3 images
(Fig. 1c).
3. Methods
3.1. Individual tree crown dataset
With a true color composition of the WorldView-3 image at a scale of
1:500, we outlined crowns of B. excelsa trees using the QGIS software
(QGIS Development Team, 2019). We used the field-acquired GNSS lo­
cations (Section 2.3) to guide the manual tree crown delineation pro­
cedure. We outlined only ITCs that could be easily identified in the
images (Fig. 1), thereby reducing eventual errors caused by the GNSS
positional uncertainty. We could identify B. excelsa trees because of their
remarkable characteristics: large crowns and height. In total, we out­
lined 2069 ITCs over the study area.
3.2. CNN architectures
The use of CNNs to retrieve tree species from satellite images is just
beginning to be explored. Thus, several technical issues remain unclear.
For example, it is not well understood how the classification accuracy is
affected by (a) different training strategies nor (b) different backbones
for feature extraction.
This study tested the DeepLabv3+ architecture with three backbone
networks: ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and MobileNetV2. DeepLabv3+ is
considered a state-of-the-art framework for semantic segmentation.
Proposed by Chen et al. (2018), it consists of an encoder-decoder
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Ecological Informatics 63 (2021) 101302
structure with atrous convolution (Chen et al., 2017) that captures
high-level semantic information and produces fine-grained segmenta­
tion. We used a downsampling factor (output stride) (Chen et al., 2017)
of eight in DeepLabv3+, which means that the input image is down­
sampled by up to a factor of eight in the encoder section.
The deep residual learning framework called Residual Network
(ResNet) was proposed by He et al. (2016). It consists of several residual
blocks that forward the feature maps (activations) of a given layer to a
deeper layer. This procedure allows the network’s number of layers
(depth) to increase, which improves feature extraction. The ResNet-18
and ResNet-50 differ from each other by the number of residual layers.
The MobileNetV2, proposed by Sandler et al. (2018), is a lightweight
neural network designed for mobile devices. It is smaller, more compact
than ResNet-18 and ResNet-50, and has a bottleneck residual block
module that uses depth-wise convolutions instead of standard convo­
lutions. More details can be found in Sandler et al. (2018).
3.3. Experimental set-up
We assessed ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and MobileNetV2’s performance
into the DeepLabv3+ architecture in the first experiment. To do this,
using the manually delineated ITCs, we sequentially extracted 1252
image patches with dimensions 256 × 256 pixels (Fig. 2a). We carefully
inspected the image patches to certify that we outlined all B. excelsa
trees within them. We randomly selected 80% (1002) of the patches for
training and 20% (250) for testing. The testing patches were used only
for validation and did not participate in the training process. Thus, they
did not update the network parameters at each epoch. For each image
patch, there is a reference labeled image in which the pixels are labeled
as either (a) B. excelsa or (b) “forest background”, to represent all other
trees. Within all 1252 image patches, there were 5,523,478 B. excelsa
pixels and 7,652,759 forest background pixels.
For the network architecture that provided the best classification
results, we tested two training frameworks. First, we trained the network
with the sequentially extracted 256 × 256 pixel-sized patches (Fig. 2a).
Second, we combined the sequentially extracted patches so that they
roughly form a square. From this image, we extracted 2000 randomly
positioned patches of size 256 × 256 pixels (Fig. 2b). We chose 2000
patches because this number of patches provided a reasonable trade-off
between classification accuracy and processing time in preliminary
tests. This approach, which we called random patch extraction, allowed
us to augment the training data size, and at each epoch, use a different
M.P. Ferreira et al.
Fig. 2. Illustration of two approaches used to train the convolutional neural network (CNN) model. (a) Sequential patch extraction. The patches are sequentially
extracted from the WorldView-3 image based on the manually delineated individual tree crowns’ boundaries. These patches are then used to train a CNN model. (b)
Random patch extraction. The sequentially extracted patches are combined so that they roughly form a squared tiled image, and, from this image, patches are
randomly extracted.
set of images to feed the network.
Additionally, for each framework (i.e., sequential or random patch
extraction, Fig. 2), we evaluate the influence of the number of training
patches on model performance. To do this, from the 1252 image patches,
we selected 20% (250) for validation. Then, we trained the CNN model
with the sequential and the random patch extraction approaches (Fig. 2)
using 125, 250, 500, 752, and 1002 patches that corresponded to 10%,
20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% of the original number of patches, respec­
tively. In this experiment, we assessed the classification accuracy of
different training percentages using a single dataset of 250 patches
selected for validation.
In all the experiments, we used a mini-batch size of 16, and we
trained the networks for 30 epochs. An epoch is a full pass over the entire
training set, while a mini-batch is a subset of the training patches used to
update the network parameters (weights and biases). We used the sto­
chastic gradient descent with momentum optimizer (Murphy, 2012).
Data augmentation was used during training and consisted of random
reflection and rotation of the patches. Class weighting was used to bal­
ance the classes, thus avoiding biased training of the network. The
weights of the ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and MobileNetV2 models were
initialized with pre-trained values of the ImageNet database (Deng et al.,
2009). The learning rate started at 0.05 and decreased by a factor of 0.5
at every five epochs.
3.4. Satellite image scene mapping of B. excelsa trees
To assess the potential of CNNs to produce maps of the B. excelsa
occurrence, we used the network architecture that provided the best
classification results (Section 3.3) to detect B. excelsa trees automatically
in an entire WorldView-3 scene (not used in the experiments) encom­
passing an area of about 24 km2 of Amazonian forests. We produced a
map of individual B. excelsa trees by employing the approach proposed
by Ferreira et al. (2020), which is based on morphological operations
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Ecological Informatics 63 (2021) 101302
performed in the score maps of the target species.
3.5. Accuracy assessment
We performed the accuracy assessment with testing patches, which
we did not use to train the networks. The results are presented in terms
of confusion matrices showing the number of correctly classified and
misclassified pixels along with relative percentages. Moreover, we
compute the user’s and producer’s accuracy and the F1-score to evaluate
the classification accuracy of B. excelsa obtained after using the random
and sequential patch extraction approaches for network training (Sec­
tion 3.3, Fig. 2).
Since it is operationally unfeasible to verify the species of each tree
mapped over the validation WorldView-3 scene (Section 3.4), we per­
formed a visual assessment of the segmented trees using field-acquired
GNSS locations of B. excelsa groves (Section 2.3). It is important to
note that the GNSS locations show planimetric positional accuracies of
approximately 5 ± 5 m. Thus, they do not represent individual trees.
4. Results
The three backbone networks (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and Mobile­
NetV2) achieved similar values of average producer’s accuracy (Fig. 3).
Specifically, ResNet-18 reached 93.87% of average producer’s accuracy
and correctly classified 93.3% of the B. excelsa pixels from the testing
patches. ResNet-18 was the less computationally intensive model, with
an elapsed time of 54 s for each epoch. For MobileNetV2 and ResNet-50,
the per-epoch training time was 86 and 140 s, respectively. Because the
ResNet-18 model provided the shortest training time, it was chosen to
test the two patch extraction approaches (Section 3.3, Fig. 2).
The classification accuracy results of the two strategies used to train
the ResNet-18 are shown in Table 1. The sequential patch extraction
procedure reached 70.17% and 60.92% of F1-score using, respectively,
M.P. Ferreira et al. Ecological Informatics 63 (2021) 101302

Fig. 3. Confusion matrices showing the classification accuracy of Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) in WorldView-3 images. The producer’s accuracy is distributed
along with the diagonal cells (highlighted in blue). The percentage of misclassification between B. excelsa and the forest background is shown in the off-diagonal cells.
Each cell contains absolute values (pixels) and relative percentages. Three convolutional neural networks were tested (a) ResNet-18; (b) ResNet-50 and (c) Mobi­
leNetV2. The networks were backbones of the DeepLabv3+ architecture for semantic segmentation. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend,
the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

maps of B. excelsa by labeling only their pixels. Fieldwork information

Table 1 revealed that the automatically detected ITCs are found in areas of
Classification accuracy metrics obtained with the sequential and random patch
B. excelsa occurrence (Fig. 5b,c).
extraction approaches (Section 3.3, Fig. 2) used to train the DeepLabv3+ ar­
chitecture with ResNet-18 as backbone. UA = User’s accuracy (%), PA = Pro­
ducer’s accuracy (%). 5. Discussion

% of training data (n◦

Sequential patch Random patch extraction
5.1. Model performance and training strategies
of patches) extraction

UA PA F1- UA PA F1-
We demonstrate the potential of CNNs and VHR satellite images to
score score
map B. excelsa trees in large tracts of Amazonian forests. We introduced
10 (125) 47.07 86.29 60.92 54.75 98.79 70.45 a novel strategy to train the CNN model to achieve high classification
20 (250) 51.23 91.52 65.69 56.59 97.95 71.74
40 (500) 57.64 92.43 71.00 55.46 98.42 70.95
accuracy (<97%) with a reduced training set. Convolutional neural
60 (752) 56.51 96.12 71.17 56.83 98.06 71.95 networks are data-driven methods that usually require large amounts of
80 (1002) 56.24 93.27 70.17 56.69 97.92 71.81 ground truth information to be successfully trained. However, ground-
based surveys are costly and may be logistically prohibitive, particu­
larly in areas of tropical forests with difficult access. The results of the
80% and 10% of the training patches, which represents a decrease of
proposed random patch extraction approach showed that the classifi­
9.25 percentage points. Conversely, for the random patch extraction
cation accuracy of the target species did not change significantly after
approach, the F1-score changed minimally, in a range of 70.45% to
reducing the percentage of training patches from 80% (1002 patches) to
71.91%, whether 10% (125) or 80% (1002) of training patches were
10% (125 patches) (Table 1). It is important to note that the random
used (see Fig. 2b).
patch extraction procedure’s application relies on a pixel-wise (dense)
Some examples of the automatic detection of B. excelsa trees in
reference labeled dataset. For training, all pixels of the image patch
testing patches of WorldView-3 images are shown in Fig. 4. The stron­
should be assigned with a label.
gest activations (feature maps) of the initial and intermediate layers
Our ITC dataset was constructed by visual interpretation. We used
reveal interesting features learned by the network. For example, one can
GNSS information from fieldwork surveys to guide the manual delin­
note that the first layer detects mainly the edges (Fig. 4b), while the
eation of B. excelsa trees in the WorldView-3 images. While GNSS
intermediate layer show positive activations (white pixels) on shadows
measurements are subject to geolocation errors, particularly under
of emergent trees (Fig. 4c). The penultimate layer shows strong activa­
dense forest canopies (Kaartinen et al., 2015), they provide crucial in­
tions on areas of B. excelsa occurrence (Fig. 4d). The network uses the
formation on B. excelsa groves. These groves are composed of emergent
feature maps information to semantically segment the image patch
trees that stand out in the forest landscape, facilitating their crowns’
(Fig. 4e). However, it labeled pixels that did not coincide with the
identification and delineation. Trees of B. excelsa often reach 30 to 50 m
ground truth (red arrows in Fig. 4d,e). A closer look at these areas of
in height and diameter at breast height that can exceed 300 cm (Baldoni
misclassification reveals that they belong to emergent trees. It is worth
et al., 2020; Mori and Prance, 1990; Scoles and Gribel, 2011). Visual
noting that the misclassified pixels did not show the same strong positive
interpretation is the most used approach by studies involving CNNs in
activations (bright white) in the penultimate layer as the pixels
vegetation remote sensing (Kattenborn et al., 2021).
belonging to the target species, which suggests low confidence by the
We used the DeepLabv3+ (Chen et al., 2018) architecture, given its
network. In Fig. 4f, we show the results obtained by the ITC detection
good performance to discriminate tropical tree species in remote sensing
method proposed by Ferreira et al. (2020). Because this method is based
images. Morales et al. (2018) achieved 98.1% of classification accuracy
on the areas in which the network has high confidence, misclassified
using the DeepLabv3+ architecture to automatically segment palm trees
pixels are suppressed.
of Mauritia flexuosa in the Peruvian Amazon from UAV images. Ferreira
In Fig. 5, we show ITCs of B. excelsa mapped over an entire
et al. (2020) used DeepLabv3+ combined with a ResNet-18 network (He
WorldView-3 scene (see Section 3.4). Our approach produced realistic
et al., 2016) to detect and identify three species of Amazonian palms in

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M.P. Ferreira et al. Ecological Informatics 63 (2021) 101302

Fig. 4. Illustration of the semantic segmentation process with DeepLabv3+ architecture and ResNet-18 as backbone network. The input image patches of 256 × 256
pixels are passed through convolutional and rectified linear unit layers that learn features from Brazil nut trees (Bertholletia excelsa). These features are used to
distinguish them from other types of trees. (a) Ground truth individual tree crowns of B. excelsa overlaid to a true color composition of the WorldView-3 image (pixel
size = 30 cm); (b) Strongest activation channel of the first convolutional layer. Note that this channel activates on edges; (c) Strongest activation channel of an
intermediate layer that activates on shaded portions of the input image; (d) Activation of the penultimate layer of the network (before the softmax layer) showing
strong activations in areas of B. excelsa occurrence; (e) Semantic segmentation results provided by the network and (f) Individual trees detected by using the method
proposed by Ferreira et al. (2020). The red arrows in (d) and (e) point to areas segmented by the network that did not coincide with the ground truth. (For
interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 5. Individual tree crowns of Brazil nut trees (Bertholletia excelsa) mapped over Amazonian forests. (a) True color composition of a WorldView-3 scene (pixel size
= 30 cm) overlaid with automatically detected ITCs of Brazil nut trees (yellow polygons) and GNSS information acquired in the field (cyan points). (b) and (c) show
two areas of B. excelsa occurrence visited in the field. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of
this article.)

6
M.P. Ferreira et al.
UAV images, reaching 87.8% of average class accuracy. Besides Deep­
Labv3+, the U-net architecture (Ronneberger et al., 2015) has been
successfully employed in tropical tree species classification tasks (e.g.,
Wagner et al. (2019); Lobo Torres et al. (2020); Wagner et al. (2020a,
2020b)). As shown by Lobo Torres et al. (2020), U-net is less compu­
tationally intensive than DeepLabv3+. Thus, we aim to use U-net in
future studies involving large-scale mapping of B. excelsa trees.
5.2. Considerations for large scale mapping of B. excelsa trees
Through successive transformations (convolutions) of the input
image, CNNs identify and learn low-level image features such as edges
and blobs and high-level features such as complex shapes representing
the target class. In the case of tree species, the features learned by a CNN
model are mainly related to the crown structure. For example, CNN
models’ classification success to retrieve palm trees in high-resolution
images (Ferreira et al., 2020; Wagner et al., 2020b) can be explained
by the peculiar pattern of the crowns of palm trees. Similarly, the dif­
ferentiation between a conifer and a broad-leaf tree relies on their
typical canopy structures (Schiefer et al., 2020). Here, we found that
deep shadows play a prominent role in B. excelsa trees detection
(Fig. 4c). These shadows result from sun-sensor geometry and are
marked for emergent trees such as adult B. excelsa individuals.
The WorldView-3 satellite has off-nadir imaging capabilities, which
means that it can acquire data in a view angle different from nadir or not
looking straight down at the target. WorldView-3 can point the sensor
up to 20◦ from nadir. The off-nadir viewing increases the sensor’s
temporal resolution but distorts the image by enlarging the instanta­
neous field of view and, consequently, the pixel size. Extreme off-nadir
viewing angles reduce image shadows (Wagner et al., 2018), which can
hamper B. excelsa tree detection. However, large-scale mapping with
VHR satellite images requires the combination of multiple scenes ac­
quired in various sun-sensor geometries and off-nadir angles. Thus, more
research is needed to assess the ability of CNNs to deal with the effects of
satellite image acquisition conditions for tree species mapping over
large spatial extents.
Another crucial aspect to consider for tree species classification from
remotely sensed data is plant phenology. Phenology determines seasonal
variations in plant characteristics such as changes in leaf color, fruiting
and flowering events. In eastern Brazilian Amazon, leaf fall for B. excelsa
trees begin at the end of the rainy season (generally in July), while
flowering occurs during the dry season (September to February) (Mori
and Prance, 1990). Phenology influences crown structural properties
and the spectral response of tropical tree species, affecting the classifi­
cation accuracy (Ferreira et al., 2019). The role of phenology in
B. excelsa discrimination with remote sensing is poorly known and re­
quires further investigation.
5.3. Perspectives for forest management and conservation
The sustainable exploration of B. excelsa is one of the most important
socio-economic activities involving non-timber products in the Amazon
(Peres et al., 2003), with minimum impacts on the forest ecosystem (de
Oliveira Wadt et al., 2018). Mapping B. excelsa trees’ spatial distribution
over large tracts of Amazonian forests has important implications for
forest management, ecological studies, and conservation policymaking.
For example, a B. excelsa map like Fig. 5 could help local communities to
find the most productive groves without roaming long distances into the
forest. Moreover, one can use species maps to improve species distri­
bution models (He et al., 2015) and assess species-specific responses to
environmental and climate change (Sales et al., 2021). Brazil nuts are
the main food source for several wild animals such as agoutis (genus
Dasyprocta) and macaws (e.g., Ara macao and Anodorhynchus hyacin­
thinus). These animals’ conservation strategies can benefit from a map of
B. excelsa tree occurrence to infer habitat suitability.
Particularly for the indigenous population that inhabits the study
7
Ecological Informatics 63 (2021) 101302
area, the Kayapó ethnic group, the Brazil nut trade represents one of the
main income-generation activities. The maps of B. excelsa can be used to
locate the most productive groves in each village’s territories. Further­
more, knowledge regarding the spatial distribution of B. excelsa
contribute to assessing the impacts of nut harvesting on the dynamics of
the species. This includes seedling density and dispersal, which is per­
formed traditionally with ground-based surveys (Ribeiro et al., 2014).
6. Conclusions
Our study shows the potential of CNNs and WorldView-3 images to
map B. excelsa trees in Amazonian forests. We propose a new model
training strategy capable of achieving a high producer’s accuracy
(>97%) with a reduced set of training patches. We confirm the effec­
tiveness of the DeepLabv3+ architecture with the ResNet-18 as a
backbone network for feature extraction. We show that the shadow of
emergent B. excelsa trees is a crucial discriminative feature. The off-
nadir imaging capabilities of WorldView-3 can affect the presence of
shadows by distorting the image. Thus, it is essential to consider the off-
nadir viewing angle of WorldView-3 images for mapping of B. excelsa
and other emergent trees. Individual trees and groves of B. excelsa can be
mapped accurately over large tracts of Amazonian forests. This helps
forest managers, ecologists, and indigenous populations to conserve and
manage this important tree species.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Matheus Pinheiro Ferreira: Conceptualization, Methodology,
Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - original
draft, Writing - review & editing. Rodolfo Georjute Lotte: Conceptu­
alization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing -
review & editing. Francisco V. D’Elia: Project administration, Super­
vision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Christos
Stamatopoulos: Resources, Data curation. Do-Hyung Kim: Resources,
Data curation, Writing - original draft. Adam R. Benjamin: Resources,
Data curation, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
None.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Bioverse Tecnologia e Inovação em
Monitoramento Ambiental and UNICEF Innovation Venture Fund. The
WorldView-3 images were downloaded and processed strictly under the
NextView license. M.P. Ferreira was supported by the Brazilian National
Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) (grant
#306345/2020-0). We are grateful to four anonymous reviewers for
their valuable suggestions that improved our manuscript quality and
presentation.
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