Gaussian mixture integration of CNN and transformer models for forest biomass estimation: A multi-sensor fusion approach with uncertainty quantification

Accurate estimation of forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is critical for carbon accounting, ecosystem monitoring, and climate change mitigation. While remote sensing offers broad spatial coverage, standard deterministic models often struggle to capture the complex relationship between spectral information and structural forest attributes, and they frequently lack reliable quantification of uncertainty. This study presents a novel probabilistic framework that integrates convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer architectures for AGB estimation using a multi-sensor fusion of Sentinel-1/2 imagery. The framework employs a customized, adaptive version of the Swin Transformer-reconfigured specifically for regression tasks and streamlined to a single-stage architecture-and implements a Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM) approach to ensemble model outputs. This framework enables the decomposition of predictive uncertainty into epistemic (model-related) and aleatoric (data-inherent) components. Evaluated across heterogeneous forest regions in Montana and Idaho, the CNN-transformer integration achieved superior performance, with R 2 =0.83, RMSE=19.16 Mg/ha, and MAE=13.37 Mg/ha, outperforming standalone CNNs (R 2 =0.81) and vision transformers (R 2 =0.80). Transfer learning and fine-tuning experiments demonstrated high model robustness, improving prediction accuracy in independent test regions by 39% in RMSE. Spatially explicit analysis revealed that while CNNs provide stable local feature extraction, the Swin Transformer’s self-attention mechanism significantly mitigates errors on topographically complex slopes by leveraging non-local spectral cues to compensate for shadowing and geometric distortions. The results highlight that an ensemble approach leveraging the complementary strengths of CNNs and customized transformers provides the transparency and precision required for operational carbon monitoring and high-resolution, trustworthy biomass mapping.