3Dtrees.earth: Technical Infrastructure for FAIR Forest LiDAR Data Management and Analysis

Close-range LiDAR technologies enable detailed three-dimensional representations of forest structure, yet their scientific reuse is severely limited by fragmented data storage, heterogeneous formats, missing metadata, and high computational barriers. We present 3Dtrees.earth, a domain-specific research data management platform designed to make forest LiDAR point clouds FAIR and directly analysis-ready (3dtrees.earth). The platform combines curated data ingestion, standardized metadata, and scalable processing by tightly integrating a dedicated LiDAR repository with the Galaxy workflow system. Containerized tools and reproducible workflows enable automated standardization, tiling, tree instance segmentation, species prediction, structural metric extraction, and web-based 3D visualization. Direct access to high-performance computing resources allows large-scale processing without local infrastructure. By coupling FAIR data management with transparent, provenance-aware analytics, 3Dtrees.earth lowers technical barriers and provides a community-driven pathway from raw point clouds to reproducible forest intelligence.