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: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
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:2608.30392v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Global food security and sustainable climate action increasingly rely on robust, scalable agricultural monitoring. Earth observation foundation models...
By Vishal Nedungadi, Xingguo Xiong, Marc Ru{\ss}wurm, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis
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:2607. 21881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agricultural field maps are often proprietary, incomplete, or outdated, yet they provide the spatial framework for crop monitoring, production accounting, and land-conversion analysis.
By Mohammadreza Narimani, Vikram Anand, Parastoo Farajpoor
arXiv:2409.13568v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Accurate delineation of agricultural field boundaries is essential for effective crop monitoring and resource management. However, competing method...
By Foivos I. Diakogiannis, Zheng-Shu Zhou, Jeff Wang, Gonzalo Mata, Dave Henry, Roger Lawes, Amy Parker, Peter Caccetta, Suzanne Furby, Rodrigo Ibata, Ondrej Hlinka, Jonathan Richetti, Kathryn Batchelor, Chris Herrmann, Andrew Toovey, John Taylor
arXiv:2608. 11996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cashew production is a widespread economic activity in Guinea-Bissau, as well as other countries in West Africa.
By Miguel, Sofia, Maria, Patr\'icia, Luke, Jo\~ao
The paper introduces a composition‑aware pretraining framework for geospatial foundation models that explicitly encodes fractional land‑cover mixtures as histogram targets for each satellite image cell. By using Earth Mover’s Distance to distill these composition targets into a 36.8 M‑parameter backbone, the authors demonstrate significant improvements on region‑level tasks such as zero‑shot image retrieval and scene classification, while maintaining competitive performance on fine‑grained tasks like segmentation and object detection. The method outperforms larger models (SatMAE and Prithvi‑EO‑2.0) and achieves a 55.6 % relative boost on the ForestNet‑12 dataset, evidencing the benefit of explicit composition modeling.
By Aryan Kashyap Naveen, Abhishek Srinivas, Pranav Moothedath, Shrutilipi Bhattacharjee
arXiv:2607. 12748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Farm site discovery from satellite imagery is a spatiotemporal candidate ranking problem because farm evidence is distributed across pasture, field boundaries, roads, buildings, and seasonal vegetation patterns.
By Usman Haider, Fatima Khalid, Karl Mason
arXiv:2607. 17661v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remote sensing has become an increasingly valuable tool for agricultural monitoring, particularly through the use of publicly available satellite imagery.
By Philipp Vaeth, Bhumika Laxman Sadbhave, Denise Dejon, Gunther Schorcht, Magda Gregorova
arXiv:2411. 05359v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Comprehensive agricultural landscape understanding is critical for addressing global challenges in food security, climate change, and resource management.
By Radhika Dua, Aditi Agarwal, Aishwarya Jayagopal, Depanshu Sani, Alex Wilson, Hoang Tran, Ishan Deshpande, Bogdan Floristean, Neelabh Goyal, Ramya Cheruvu, Vishal Batchu, Yan Mayster, Gaurav Aggarwal, Alok Talekar, Vaibhav Rajan