Lidar · Remote sensing · Machine learning · Forest monitoring
Tiago de Conto
About
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Industry experience
Education
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Selected work
Selected contributions
Papers, NASA data products, software and research themes I have been part of.
From single trees to the planet
One forest, many scales of measurement
Terrestrial lidar resolves individual trees down to their branches, airborne lidar maps the landscape, and GEDI samples the canopy from space. Linking these tools across scales helps us describe forests worldwide.
Explore the data
Live views of the data I work with
Real outputs, served as small static files straight from this page. No servers, no logins.
Forest structural complexity through time
Quarterly WSCI from the GEDI L4C Fusion product. A deep-learning model fuses GEDI lidar with Sentinel-1 and ALOS-2 radar and terrain at 25 m, so changes in 3D forest structure can be followed quarter by quarter.
Click the map to see a pixel’s history.
Data: De Conto, Armston & Dubayah (2026), ORNL DAAC · 50 m preview of a 0.25° window · Basemap: Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Billions of shots, one hexagon at a time
Four years (2019–2023) of quality-filtered GEDI footprints over a 1°×1° Amazon tile, aggregated on H3 hexagons, the spatial index behind gedih3. Coarse levels summarise the landscape; finer levels (8–9) start to reveal individual orbit tracks.
Hover a hexagon for details; with shots on, click a shot. Grey shots have the selected product’s release-3 quality flag = 0 (1 = quality).
Data: NASA GEDI L2A, L4A, L4C (ORNL DAAC / LP DAAC).
Tree reconstruction, then & now
The same terrestrial lidar plot processed two ways. On the left is TreeLS (2019): tree mapping, stem points and stem circles. On the right are the state-of-the-art tools I use in my research today, raycloudtools and arbor: whole-tree segmentation and their quantitative structural models (QSMs).
Deciduous forest plot
Terrestrial laser scanning · local coordinates.
The world’s forests, as seen by GEDI
Four years of GEDI lidar (2019–2023) on 1 km grids: the Waveform Structural Complexity Index (WSCI) alongside biomass and canopy height from the mission’s gridded products.
Layers: GEDI L4C gridded WSCI, L4B gridded AGBD, L3 mean RH100 (ORNL DAAC), resampled to ~10 km, colour range = global 1st–99.5th percentiles · Earth: NASA Blue Marble via GIBS.
Expertise
From photons to products
Tools