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:2606. 29664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite imagery promise broad generalization across remote sensing tasks and regions, but their geographic transferability has not been systematically tested, especially in agriculture applications.
By Zhuocheng Shang, Sanmay Das, Ahmed Eldawy
Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite imagery promise broad generalization across remote sensing tasks and regions, but their geographic transferability has not been systematically tested, especially in agriculture applications. This paper presents a controlled benchmark that evaluates three models, Prithvi, SpectralGPT, and SatMAE, on multi-temporal crop segmentation and change detection across four U.
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:2609.36975v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Operational estimation of wheat-cultivated area is persistently constrained by discordance between administrative record-keeping and remotely sensed cl...
By Kasimali Agharia, Ujjwal Kumar Gupta
The paper introduces a framework to evaluate AlphaEarth embeddings for crop classification across spatial, temporal, and cross-regional dimensions. It compares a 64‑dimensional embedding space with traditional Sentinel‑2, NDVI, and harmonic features using field data from the US and India, finding that embeddings offer superior distribution‑aware separability and capture multi‑year crop rotation dynamics, while traditional features transfer better across continents. The study highlights a trade‑off between representational richness and cross‑region transferability, suggesting a hybrid approach for large‑scale crop classification.
By Priyanka Goyal, Maitreyee Sar, Adway Mitra, Manjira Sinha
arXiv:2606. 05731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-season crop type mapping is critical for food security in the face of increasingly extreme climate-related threats to crops.
By August Posch, Jitendra Kumar, Forrest M. Hoffman, Auroop R. Ganguly
arXiv:2610.27793v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Uncertainty in the terrestrial carbon cycle remains a major constraint in climate projections, partly due to imperfect land surface representations i...
By Amirpasha Mozaffari, Marina Casta\~no, Stefano Materia, Joan Vedr\'i, Jordi Varela-Agrelo, Dario Garcia-Gasulla, Etienne Tourigny, Mario Acosta, Amanda Duarte
arXiv:2608. 00870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Panoptic crop mapping requires both delineating individual agricultural parcels and assigning a crop type to each parcel from satellite image time series.
By Xuechen Li
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
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.
By Ghjulia Sialelli, Linus Scheibenreif, Jan Dirk Wegner, Konrad Schindler
arXiv:2608. 11638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatially continuous quantification of forest above-ground biomass (AGB) is what makes carbon accounting credible and mitigation strategies actionable.
By Pann Thinzar Seint, Bryan Atwood, Subas Chhatkuli