Coverage Is a Model Input: What AlphaEarth Changes in Forest Biomass Monitoring
TL;DR for operators A forest-monitoring team is not choosing between sensors on accuracy alone. It is choosing between a structurally rich measurement source that is expensive and intermittent and a cheaper annual representation that can keep far more field observations usable across time and geography. On the same restricted set of 589 plots, tuned LiDAR-only and combined models reach $R^2$ up to 0.79, while the annual learned representation reaches 0.67. But when annual availability expands the usable dataset to 6,801 observations, the best model using those annual representations reaches $R^2 = 0.82$. ...