Toward a foundation model for forest point clouds

Forest inventories increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) models to derive forest attributes from large-scale 3D point clouds. Current models are typically specialized to a single task, sensor, and forest type, making adaptation expensive in terms of annotations, computation, and expertise. We ask whether a single pretrained model can instead learn transferable representations across diverse forest inventory settings. Inspired by recent developments in language modelling and computer vision, we take a step toward a foundation model (FM) for 3D forestry. Using LitePT as backbone, we first establish a strong supervised baseline that sets a new state of the art on forest semantic and instance segmentation, tree species classification, and age regression benchmarks. We then curate a large-scale unlabelled corpus spanning airborne, UAV, and mobile laser scanning across diverse forest ecosystems, and pretrain the same backbone using self-supervised learning. We systematically evaluate representation learning strategies by comparing training from scratch, supervised pretraining, and self-supervised pretraining across four representative forestry tasks, under varying annotation budgets. Compared with training from scratch, self-supervised pretraining accelerates model convergence and consistently improves performance when annotations are scarce. Compared with task-specific supervised pretraining, self-supervised pretraining yields more transferable representations across downstream forestry tasks. These findings identify the practical regime in which pretrained representations are most valuable and suggest that instance discrimination, rather than forest semantics, is the main remaining obstacle to a general-purpose 3D forest foundation model. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/prs-eth/ForPT.