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Neural Processes Maintain Calibrated Biomass Estimates Across Spatiotemporal Gaps and Disturbance

arXiv 2604.03874 ↗First posted 4 Apr 2026cs.LG cs.CEcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Monitoring deforestation-driven carbon emissions requires both spatially explicit and temporally continuous estimates of aboveground biomass density (AGBD) with calibrated uncertainty. NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) provides reliable LIDAR-derived AGBD, but its orbital sampling causes irregular spatiotemporal coverage, and occasional operational interruptions, including a 13-month hibernation from March 2023 to April 2024, leave extended gaps in the observational record. Prior work has used machine learning approaches to fill GEDI's spatial gaps using satellite-derived features, but temporal interpolation of biomass through unobserved periods, particularly across active disturbance events, remains largely unaddressed. Moreover, standard ensemble methods for biomass mapping have been shown to produce systematically miscalibrated prediction intervals. To address these gaps, we extend the Attentive Neural Process (ANP) framework, previously applied to spatial biomass interpolation, to jointly sparse spatiotemporal settings using geospatial foundation model embeddings. We treat space and time symmetrically, empirically validating a form of space-for-time substitution in which observations from nearby locations at other times inform predictions at held-out periods. Our results demonstrate that the ANP produces well-calibrated uncertainty estimates across disturbance regimes, supporting its use in Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) applications that require reliable uncertainty quantification for forest carbon accounting.

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References · 12

  1. 2016XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting Systemcited by 5,166
  2. 2018Conditional Neural Processescited by 426
  3. 2022SatMAE: Pre-training Transformers for Temporal and Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagerycited by 408
  4. 2019Attentive Neural Processescited by 283
  5. 2024Prithvi-EO-2.0: A Versatile Multi-Temporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation Applicationscited by 144
  6. 2025AlphaEarth Foundations: An embedding field model for accurate and efficient global mapping from sparse label datacited by 137
  7. 2024AnySat: One Earth Observation Model for Many Resolutions, Scales, and Modalitiescited by 74
  8. 2025TESSERA: Temporal Embeddings of Surface Spectra for Earth Representation and Analysiscited by 39
  9. 2025TerraFM: A Scalable Foundation Model for Unified Multisensor Earth Observationcited by 25
  10. 2024AGBD: A Global-scale Biomass Datasetcited by 13
  11. 2024Uncertainty quantification for probabilistic machine learning in earth observation using conformal predictioncited by 9
  12. 2026Interpolation of GEDI Biomass Estimates with Calibrated Uncertainty Quantificationcited by 4

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