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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-287-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Optimisation of PointNet++ for Tree Species Classification from Drone LiDAR Data</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Hamdani</surname>
<given-names>Nada</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Abouhat</surname>
<given-names>Imane</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ait El Kadi</surname>
<given-names>Kenza</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bensiali</surname>
<given-names>Saloua</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Sebari</surname>
<given-names>Imane</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Research Unit of Geospatial Technologies for a Smart Decision, Hassan II Institute of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine, 10101 Rabat, Morocco</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Department of Photogrammetry and Cartography, School of Geomatics and Surveying Engineering, Hassan II Institute of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine, 10101 Rabat, Morocco</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Department of Applied Statistics and Computer Science, Hassan II Institute of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine, 10101 Rabat, Morocco</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Société Topographie Informatique, 91000 Evry Courcouronnes, France</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>03</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-1-2026</volume>
<fpage>287</fpage>
<lpage>296</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Nada Hamdani et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/287/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-287-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/287/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-287-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/287/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-287-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/287/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-287-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Trees play a key role in our planet. They regulate climate, preserve biodiversity, and contribute to human well-being. Each species has different contributions to our globe and a specific carbon storage potential. Identifying tree species enables better measurement of global carbon and helps authorities better manage forests and green spaces. Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) LiDAR has become a powerful source of 3D point cloud for vegetation analysis, given its ability to capture a large area in a short time and its capacity to penetrate canopy layers. Deep learning methods extract discriminative features directly from raw point clouds and generalize well to unseen datasets. This study optimises PointNet++ deep learning architecture for tree species classification by analysing the influence of sampling configurations on the performance of model detection, by using an open-source dataset &amp;ldquo;FOR-species20K&amp;rdquo;. Three-point cloud sampling configurations (4 096, 8 192, and 16 384 points per tree) were tested with three random seeds (0,42 and 123) to assess their impact on classification accuracy and ensure stability of prediction. Results on a separate test set of 508 trees show a consistent improvement in performance of PointNet++ with a sampling configuration of 8 192 points per tree, reaching a macro-average F1-score of 89.65%, surpassing the 74.9 % reported by (Puliti et al., 2025a) for evaluating the same architecture. Dominant species such as &lt;em&gt;Fagus sylvatica&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Picea abies&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Pinus sylvestris&lt;/em&gt; achieve F1-scores exceeding 90%, indicating high model robustness. This study approves that the performance of PointNet++ could be improved by raising the number of points from 4 096 to 8 192, but further increasing to 16 384 points introduces interspecific confusion and requires extensive computational time for model training. This research aligns and complements the global initiative led by Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in Switzerland (ETH Zurich), which is interested in identifying tree species using deep learning (&amp;ldquo;ETH Zurich&amp;rdquo;, 2025).</p>
</abstract>
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