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
The study maps tree species across Denmark using National Forest Inventory plots and Earth Observation data, comparing manually engineered spectral‑temporal features (STF) from Sentinel‑1 and Sentinel‑2 with embeddings from the foundation models TESSERA and AlphaEarth. Random forest, XGBoost, and MLP classifiers were evaluated, with the STF‑based MLP achieving the highest macro F1 scores for pure and mixed stands. The best model was applied nationally to produce a 10 m resolution tree species map, achieving 79.9% area‑adjusted accuracy and released as an open‑access product.
By Alkiviadis Koukos, Spyros Kondylatos, Thomas Nord-Larsen, Lotte Nyborg, Christian T{\o}ttrup, Kenneth Grogan
The study maps tree species across Denmark using National Forest Inventory plots and Earth Observation data, comparing manually engineered spectral‑temporal features (STF) with embeddings from foundation models TESSERA and AlphaEarth. Random forest, XGBoost, and MLP classifiers were evaluated, with the STF‑based MLP achieving the highest macro F1 scores (0.843 for pure stands, 0.653 for mixed stands). The best model was applied nationally to produce a 10 m resolution tree species map, achieving 79.9% area‑adjusted accuracy and released as an open‑access resource.
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
The study presents a new approach to detect Christmas tree plantations in high‑resolution aerial imagery, treating the task as a rare‑target semantic segmentation problem. It introduces a Hard Negative Mining strategy that significantly improves precision‑recall performance, achieving an IoU of 0.733 and an F1‑score of 0.846 on a 2020 test set. Temporal transfer experiments demonstrate the model’s ability to generalize across years, while large‑scale validation highlights the challenge posed by the plantations’ small spatial footprint.
By Francesca Razzano, Emanuele Dalsasso, Adrien Baysse-Lain\'e, Silvia Liberata Ullo, Gilda Schirinzi, Jocelyn Chanussot
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