Evaluating AlphaEarth Embeddings for Crop Classification: Separability, Temporal Dynamics, and Cross-Regional Transferability
Priyanka Goyal, Maitreyee Sar, Adway Mitra, Manjira Sinha
Earth Observation (EO)-based agricultural monitoring is shifting from pixel-level spectral analysis toward representation-driven modeling, yet systematic evaluation of learned representations remains limited. Geospatial foundation models (FMs) generate high-dimensional embeddings encoding complex spatio-temporal land-surface properties, but their utility and interpretability for agricultural applications remain insufficiently understood. This study presents a representation-agnostic framework evaluating a 64-dimensional AlphaEarth embedding space against Sentinel-2 reflectance, NDVI phenology, and harmonic features across geometric separability, temporal dynamics, spatial robustness, and cross-regional generalisation using field-scale data from the Conterminous United States (CONUS; 2017-2023) and Northern India (2021). Traditional features achieve strong linear separability (Fisher ratio), while embeddings provide superior distribution-aware separation - Bhattacharyya and Mahalanobis distances up to an order of magnitude higher for spectrally similar pairs (e.g. Corn/Soybeans: 3.9 vs. 0.10). Embeddings uniquely capture multi-year crop rotation dynamics, yielding a separability ratio of 1.784, versus a maximum of 1.003 for all engineered features. Under spatially explicit validation, embeddings exhibit lower residual spatial autocorrelation of errors (mean Moran's $I \approx 0.17$), reducing reliance on geographic proximity. However, harmonic features show stronger cross-continental transferability (US $\to$ India Macro F1: 0.493 vs. 0.326 for embeddings), with NDVI showing a similar advantage. The combined feature space yields balanced performance. These findings reveal a trade-off between representational richness and cross-region transferability, providing a framework for feature selection in large-scale crop classification.
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