3Dtrees.earth

Website from the University of Freiburg's GeoSense group, with GFZ and partner institutes, that collects laser scans of forests, segments them into individual trees and serves them for viewing and download.

What is reusable: unknown sourcepartly open dataAPI unknownopen participation Contributors choose whether a dataset is public, view-only or private; public datasets can be browsed without an account and downloaded with one, and private downloads need the owner's approval. The site does not say what licence datasets carry. Documented programmatic access is on the roadmap, not yet offered.

It is developed at the Chair of Sensor-based Geoinformatics (GeoSense) at the University of Freiburg, with the university's Forest Growth and Dendroecology chair, Galaxy Europe and the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences.² Those four institutions form its governance board.^2,3 Further partners include NIBIO, Fraunhofer IPM, NFDI4Earth and the Future Forest cluster.² The team builds on its experience with deadtrees.earth.²

The aim is a shared reference collection for the 3D structure of trees.² A laser scanner on a tripod, a backpack or a drone can resolve a stand down to individual branches, but each survey produces a large file in its own format and conditions, and the files are hard to find or compare.² The platform collects the scans in one place, with notes on how each was taken, and processes them all the same way.²

Contributors upload LAS or LAZ files, standard formats for point clouds (the sets of 3D points a scanner records), from terrestrial, mobile or drone scanning.⁵ The platform stores the metadata and runs processing pipelines on Galaxy, including tree segmentation (separating the cloud into individual trees) and species identification.^1,4 Results show as a point cloud in the browser, and datasets are packaged for download on request.^1,4 A map lists the public datasets.¹ On 19 October 2026 the home page counted 2,444 datasets from 733 contributors covering 15,408 hectares, including forest plots in Germany, Spain, Kenya and Canada.¹ Viewing public datasets needs no account; uploading and downloading do.⁵

Each dataset can be public, view-only or private.^1,5 The project's goal is open, FAIR forest data (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).¹ The platform is registered in re3data, a registry of research data repositories, under DOI 10.17616/R31NJO12.² The July 2026 roadmap lists these as in progress or ahead:¹

automatic DOIs for published datasets
fine-grained sharing
an audited reference release
raster products such as canopy height
programmatic data access¹

The team holds a quarterly open town hall³ and is preparing a first manuscript about the platform.¹