Tree Species - Sentinel-2 - Germany, 2016

The Tree Species Germany product provides a map of dominant tree species across Germany for the year 2016 at a spatial resolution of 10 meters. The map depicts the distribution of ten tree species groups derived from multi-temporal optical Sentinel-2 data. The input features explicitly incorporate phenological information to capture seasonal vegetation dynamics relevant for species discrimination. A total of over 100,000 training and test samples were compiled from publicly accessible sources, including urban tree inventories, Google Earth Pro, Google Street View, and field observations. The final product was created by majority-voting on annual XGBoost Sentinel-2 tree species classifications (2016–2024) and filtering with forest structure data. If no clear majority vote was achieved, the class uncertain was assigned. The Tree Species Germany 2016 product achieves an overall F1-score of 0.95. For the dominant species pine, spruce, beech, and oak, class-wise F1-scores range from 0.92 to 0.99, while F1-scores for other widespread species such as birch, alder, larch, Douglas fir, fir, and other deciduous species range from 0.85 to 0.96. The product provides a consistent, high-resolution, and up-to-date representation of tree species distribution across Germany. Its transferable, cost-efficient, and repeatable methodology enables reliable large-scale forest monitoring and offers a valuable basis for assessing spatial patterns and temporal changes in forest composition in the context of ongoing climatic and environmental dynamics.