Earth embeddings are decomposable records of the land surface

TL;DR

The study demonstrates that Earth embeddings—compressed representations of annual satellite data—encode specific ecological phenomena such as fire events, deforestation, and crop types. By analyzing two major embedding products, researchers show these vectors can detect abrupt canopy loss within the first growing season after disturbance and distinguish between prescribed and wildfire, with differences in sensitivity to small, fast-recovering fires and crop classification accuracy.

Why It Matters

Earth embeddings are increasingly used in environmental monitoring and policy-making, so understanding their internal structure is critical for trust and interpretability. This work enables better use of these models by revealing what ecological signals they capture, improving applications in carbon accounting, biodiversity tracking, and land-use change detection.

Key Findings

• Earth embeddings contain identifiable representations of specific ecological events like fire, forest clearing, and crop type.
• The embeddings can detect canopy loss as early as the first post-disturbance growing season and differentiate between prescribed fire and wildfire.
• One embedding product detects small, rapidly recovering fires better, while the other shows stronger separation of crop types.