Forest Guardian: YOLOv8n-seg for invasive acacia

Segments invasive acacia stands in top-down satellite imagery of Portugal. 🥇 1st place overall, JunctionX Lisbon 2025.

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Model

Results (validation split)

Training data

Satellite tiles (Esri World Imagery) cut around acacia stands mapped in Portugal's COS2018 land-use map (class 5.1.1.6), plus tiles of other land as negatives. Masks are COS2018 polygons rasterised to 640×640. See the dataset card.

Usage

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from ultralytics import YOLO

weights = hf_hub_download("duartepcruz/forest-guardian-yolov8-seg", "best.pt")
model = YOLO(weights)
results = model.predict("tile.jpg", imgsz=640, conf=0.25)
results[0].show()

Intended use

This is a first pass that points foresters at places worth checking. It is tuned to stay quiet when unsure, so an empty result means "nothing obvious", not "no acacia".

Limitations

• Recall: it misses about a third of acacia stands, especially in yellow bloom (most training tiles show non-flowering trees). Lowering conf to about 0.15 helps.
• Coarse masks: the labels are map polygons at landscape scale, not tree crowns, so the boxes are more reliable than the mask outlines.
• Domain: it was trained on a single satellite basemap at a similar zoom. Drone imagery, other seasons and other resolutions are out of distribution.
• Labels: COS2018 is a land-use map, not field-verified ground truth.