Democratizing 3D ecology: Mobile neural radiance field for scalable ecosystem mapping in change detection

Henry Cerbone, Sruthi M. Krishna Moorthy, Rob Salguero-Gomez, Graham Taylor

High-resolution 3D monitoring is vital for understanding ecological dynamics, but methods like terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) are limited by cost and accessibility. We demonstrate that mobile neural radiance fields (NeRF), using consumer smartphones and open-source platforms, 
can produce vegetation reconstructions comparable to TLS in open environments, though performance decreases under dense canopies. Mobile NeRF methods democratize ecological monitoring by reducing hardware barriers, excelling at capturing understory complexity, and potentially integrating hyperspectral and robotic data for scalable ecosystem surveillance.