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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%).
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.
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...
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...
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.