arXiv Machine Learning

Multi-Modal, Multi-Temporal Geospatial Foundation Models Improve Global Above-Ground Biomass Estimation

The study evaluates 13 Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) for estimating above‑ground biomass (AGB) from satellite imagery, comparing them to a fully supervised state‑of‑the‑art baseline trained on the AGBD dataset. Most GFMs perform worse than the baseline, but TESSERA and AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) features combined with specific prediction heads achieve superior results, with the best model attaining an RMSE of 50.79 Mg/ha. This AEF‑based model also generalizes better to unseen regions, reduces RMSE by up to 25% in excluded areas, and matches the ESA CCI biomass product when trained on limited regional labels.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Foundation-Model Earth Representations Enable Regional-Scale Forest Aboveground Biomass Monitoring Across the Northeastern United States

arXiv:2607. 27217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is a critical indicator of ecosystem productivity and terrestrial carbon storage, yet regional carbon monitoring remains constrained by the sparse spatial and temporal availability of field inventories and airborne structural measurements.

By Shashika Lamahewage, Chandi Witharana
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AgroBench: A Reproducible Multimodal Benchmark for Weakly Supervised Crop Yield Learning from County Statistics and Pixel Observations

AgroBench is a reproducible benchmark that converts U.S. county-level crop yield statistics into weakly supervised pixel‑level crop time series. The data generation pipeline fuses USDA yield data with land cover masks, Sentinel‑2 and Sentinel‑1 imagery, climatic variables, and terrain information to produce multimodal sequences for individual crop pixels across the growing season. The benchmark includes over 13 million observations from 788,654 crop pixels, covering 5,107 county‑year combinations for five major U.S. crops from 2017 to 2024, and establishes a Leave‑One‑Year‑Out evaluation protocol with baseline machine learning results.

By Udaiveer Singh, Rajiv Ranjan, Shashank Tamaskar, Dharmendra Saraswat
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Geospatial embeddings detect old-growth forests but buffered spatial validation narrows their advantage over Sentinel features

arXiv:2609.28194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Old-growth forests develop over centuries under minimal anthropogenic disturbance, producing structurally complex and biodiverse stands. In Europe, pro...

By Thomas Ratsakatika (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK), Mihai Zotta (Fundatia Conservation Carpathia, Brasov, Romania), Srinivasan Keshav (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK), Emily R. Lines (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

From Foundation Embeddings to Cropland Maps: Label Efficiency, Temporal Transferability and Independent Human Validation

The study evaluates the use of frozen geospatial foundation embeddings (AlphaEarth) for mapping cultivated versus non‑cultivated land in Maine. Using 192 spatially separated patches and USDA Cropland Data Layer labels, a lightweight classifier achieved 93.7% overall accuracy without fine‑tuning, and a nearest‑class‑centroid rule reached 90.2%. A balanced sample of 60,000 labeled pixels was nearly as effective as the full 8.6 million‑pixel pool, and classifiers trained in one year remained accurate across 2018‑2023. In a blind human validation of 385 points, the AlphaEarth‑plus‑random‑forest map matched 95.3% of the consensus, outperforming the CDL reference (91.7%).

By Mohammad Ammar Mughees, Giovanni Montefoschi, Zhongxin Chen, Maria Antonia Brovelli
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 1

Cryo-Bench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Cryosphere Mapping

Cryo-Bench is a new benchmark that evaluates foundation models for cryosphere mapping, comprising six semantic‑segmentation datasets across five cryospheric components (supraglacial debris, glacial lakes, sea ice, calving fronts, and Antarctic ice‑shelf extent). The benchmark includes multispectral, RGB, and SAR observations from under‑represented regions and tests thirteen geo‑foundation models alongside U‑Net and Vision Transformer baselines. Results show that with frozen encoders U‑Net slightly outperforms TerraMind, but the difference is not statistically significant; fine‑tuning with learning‑rate optimization can dramatically improve performance for some models, while in few‑shot scenarios several foundation models retain over 90 % of their full‑label accuracy.

By Saurabh Kaushik, Lalit Maurya, Beth Tellman, Swalpa Kumar Roy, Valerio Marsocci, Gustau Camps-Valls, Jocelyn Chanussot