Earth embeddings are decomposable records of the land surface

Robin Young, Srinivasan Keshav

Ecological monitoring, carbon accounting and biodiversity assessment increasingly rely on annual Earth embeddings--learned vectors that compress a year of satellite observation for every ten-meter pixel on Earth, consumed in place of the imagery itself. What these vectors mean has not been established. Here we decompose two widely used embedding products and show that they contain individual ecological features, including fire, forest clearing and crop type, validated against independent reference data on events across six continents. The recovered concepts date abrupt canopy loss to the first post-disturbance growing season and resolve severity well enough to separate prescribed fire from wildfire. Small fires that recover quickly are detectable in one product but not the other, which instead separates crops more strongly.