Ecological mapping with geospatial foundation models
The value of Earth observation foundation models for high-impact ecological applications remains insufficiently characterized. This study is one of the first to systematically evaluate the performance, limitations and practical considerations across three common ecological use cases: forest functional trait estimation, land use and land cover mapping and peatland detection. We fine-tune two pretrained models (Prithvi-EO-2.0 and TerraMind) and benchmark them against a ResNet-101 baseline using datasets collected from open sources. Across all tasks, Prithvi-EO-2.0 and TerraMind consistently outperform the ResNet baseline, demonstrating improved generalization and transfer across ecological domains. TerraMind marginally exceeds Prithvi-EO-2.0 in unimodal settings and shows substantial gains when additional modalities are incorporated. However, performance is sensitive to divergence between downstream inputs and pretraining modalities, underscoring the need for careful dataset alignment. Results also indicate that higher-resolution inputs and more accurate pixel-level labels remain critical for capturing fine-scale ecological dynamics.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Low-Rank Adaptation of Geospatial Foundation Models for Wildfire Mapping Using Sentinel-2 Data
Wildfire burned-area mapping is essential for damage assessment, emissions modeling, and understanding fire-climate interactions across diverse ecological regions. Recent geospatial foundation models provide strong gener…
Domain GeneralizationAn Open Benchmark Dataset for GeoAI Foundation Models for Oil Palm Mapping in Indonesia
Oil palm cultivation remains one of the leading causes of deforestation in Indonesia. To better track and address this challenge, detailed and reliable mapping is needed to support sustainability efforts and emerging reg…
Assessment of a new GeoAI foundation model for flood inundation mapping
Vision foundation models are a new frontier in Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), an interdisciplinary research area that applies and extends AI for geospatial problem solving and geographic knowledge discovery,…
Flood Inundation MappingRepresentation LearningSmart Data Mapping for Connecting Power System Model and Geospatial Data
Knowing the geospatial locations of power system model elements and linking load models with end users and their communities are the foundation for analyzing system resilience and vulnerability to natural hazards. Howeve…
Deploying Geospatial Foundation Models in the Real World: Lessons from WorldCereal
The increasing availability of geospatial foundation models has the potential to transform remote sensing applications such as land cover classification, environmental monitoring, and change detection. Despite promising …
Change Detection