Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ UFZ http://www.ufz.de/ https://ror.org/000h6jb29 2026 HeideBench: A Multispectral UAV Time-Series Benchmark for Forest Crown Phenology in Dölauer Heide dataset https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.993969 2026-05-19T05:15:32 We present HeideBench, a very-high-resolution multispectral uncrewed aerial vehicle dataset for forest crown phenology collected over a forest patch in Dölauer Heide, Halle (Saale), Germany. Dölauer Heide is currently dominated by pine plantations (Kiefernforste), which cover the largest area but are increasingly affected by dieback, while its potential natural vegetation is sessile oak–hornbeam forest rich in small-leaved lime (Albrecht et al., 1993). In addition to these pine stands, the area contains near-natural mixed deciduous forests with oaks, birches, and beeches, making it a particularly relevant setting for observing seasonal canopy development under contrasting forest structures and ongoing ecological transition. Against this background, HeideBench provides repeated observations of the same forest patch through the growing season. The dataset contains 18 georeferenced multispectral GeoTIFF orthomosaics acquired between 6 March 2025 and 5 November 2025, spanning a 244-day seasonal period from early spring to late autumn. The acquisitions have a median revisit interval of 14 days, with intervals ranging from 4 to 27 days, and an average ground sampling distance of 5.53 cm per pixel. The valid imaging footprint covers approximately 32.1 ha and is bounded by 11.902653–11.911325°E and 51.499959–51.508576°N. Data were collected using a DJI Mavic 3M Enterprise uncrewed aerial vehicle equipped with four multispectral cameras measuring green (560 nm), red (650 nm), red-edge (730 nm), and near-infrared (860 nm) reflectance, in that order. Flights used a real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning module for centimeter-level geolocation, and all data are provided in coordinate reference system EPSG:25832. Imagery was processed with Agisoft Metashape 2.3.1 to generate calibrated multispectral orthomosaics. The dataset further includes 5,885 crop-safe individual tree crown instance segmentations over the same footprint, extracted with the DeepTrees software package (Khan et al., 2025). HeideBench is intended to support crown-centric analyses of seasonal canopy development, temporal representation learning, phenology-aware feature extraction, and the evaluation of tree crown delineation under seasonal change. HeideBench is a result of the Dynamic Platform Project titled "PhenoEmbed: Multispectral UAV AI Embeddings for phenology-aware tree crown delineation" of the Integration Platform 1: "Sustainable future land use" (IP1) at the Helmholz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, Germany. Albrecht T Buschendorf J Drechsler K Geissler H Gluch W Gnielka R Weidlich M 1993 Die Dölauer Heide-Waldidylle in Großstadtnähe report Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 Arnold Caroline 0000-0002-9458-1517 Grover Harsh 0009-0000-2055-7525 2025 DeepTrees: Tree Crown Segmentation and Analysis in Remote Sensing Imagery with PyTorch journal article Journal of Open Source Software 10(114) https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.08056 8056 ReadMe - file description of Multispectral UAV Time-Series Benchmark dataset from Heidebench 2025 https://download.pangaea.de/reference/139842/attachments/README_v2.md 11.902653 11.911325 51.499959 51.508576 11.906989 51.5042675 2025-03-06T00:00:00 2025-11-05T00:00:00 HeideBench_2025 HeideBench 51.508576 11.902653 2025-03-06T00:00:00 51.499959 11.911325 2025-11-05T00:00:00 Drone, DJI, Mavic3M https://enterprise.dji.com/mavic-3-m Khan, Taimur 492 CC-BY-4.0 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Date Date http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 Date Raster graphic, GeoTIFF format GeoTIFF Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 GeoTIFF File content Content Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 file content Content (file content) Coordinate reference system CRS Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 CRS UTM Easting, Universal Transverse Mercator UTM east m Length L http://dbpedia.org/resource/Length Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 westbound UTM east [m] (westbound) UTM Northing, Universal Transverse Mercator UTM north m Length L http://dbpedia.org/resource/Length Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 southbound UTM north [m] (southbound) UTM Easting, Universal Transverse Mercator UTM east m Length L http://dbpedia.org/resource/Length Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 eastbound UTM east [m] (eastbound) UTM Northing, Universal Transverse Mercator UTM north m Length L http://dbpedia.org/resource/Length Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 northbound UTM north [m] (northbound) Longitude, westbound Longitude west Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 westbound Longitude west (westbound) Latitude, southbound Latitude south Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 southbound Latitude south (southbound) Longitude, eastbound Longitude east Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 eastbound Longitude east (eastbound) Latitude, northbound Latitude north Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 northbound Latitude north (northbound) Pixel size Pixel size m size http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/PATO_0000117 Length L http://dbpedia.org/resource/Length Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 x-direction Pixel size [m] (x-direction) Pixel size Pixel size m size http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/PATO_0000117 Length L http://dbpedia.org/resource/Length Khan Taimur 0000-0001-7833-5474 y-direction Pixel size [m] (y-direction) Image pixel width Image pixel w # 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