Analyzing the planet at scale with satellite imagery and machine learning is a dream that has been constantly hindered by the cost of difficult-to-access highly-representative high-resolution imagery. To remediate this, we introduce here the WorldStratified dataset. The largest and most varied such publicly available dataset, at Airbus SPOT 6/7 satellites' high resolution of up to 1.5 m/pixel, empowered by European Space Agency's Phi-Lab as part of the ESA-funded QueryPlanet project, we curate 10,000 sq km of unique locations to ensure stratified representation of all types of land-use across the world: from agriculture to ice caps, from forests to multiple urbanization densities. We also enrich those with locations typically under-represented in ML datasets: sites of humanitarian interest, illegal mining sites, and settlements of persons at risk.

Unsupervised pre-training methods for large vision models have shown to enhance performance on downstream supervised tasks. Developing similar techniques for satellite imagery presents significant opportunities as unlabelled data is plentiful and the inherent temporal and multi-spectral structure provides avenues to further improve existing pre-training strategies. In this paper, we present SatMAE, a pre-training framework for temporal or multi-spectral satellite imagery based on Masked Autoencoder (MAE). To leverage temporal information, we include a temporal embedding along with independently masking image patches across time. In addition, we demonstrate that encoding multi-spectral data as groups of bands with distinct spectral positional encodings is beneficial. Our approach yields strong improvements over previous state-of-the-art techniques, both in terms of supervised learning performance on benchmark datasets (up to $\uparrow$ 7%), and transfer learning performance on downstream remote sensing tasks, including land cover classification (up to $\uparrow$ 14%) and semantic segmentation.

The challenges of ongoing war in Sudan highlight the need for rapid monitoring and analysis of such conflicts. Advances in deep learning and readily available satellite remote sensing imagery allow for near real-time monitoring. This paper uses 4-band imagery from Planet Labs with a deep learning model to show that fire damage in armed conflicts can be monitored with minimal delay. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using five case studies in Sudan. We show that, compared to a baseline, the automated method captures the active fires and charred areas more accurately. Our results indicate that using 8-band imagery or time series of such imagery only result in marginal gains. Keywords: 1. Introduction The ongoing armed conflict in Sudan began in April 2023.

Harmful algal blooms are a growing threat to inland water quality and public health worldwide, creating an urgent need for e fficient, accurate, and cost-e ff ective detection methods. This research introduces a high-performing methodology that integrates multiple open-source remote sensing data with advanced artificial intelligence models. Key data sources include Copernicus Sentinel-2 optical imagery, the Copernicus Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and NOAA's High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) climate data, all e ffi ciently retrieved using platforms like Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Microsoft Planetary Computer (MPC). The NIR and two SWIR bands from Sentinel-2, the altitude from the elevation model, the temperature and wind from NOAA as well as the longitude and latitude were the most important features. The approach combines two types of machine learning models--tree-based models and a neural network--into an ensemble for classifying algal bloom severity. While the tree models performed strongly on their own, incorporating a neural network added robustness and demonstrated how deep learning models can e ff ectively use diverse remote sensing inputs. The method leverages high-resolution satellite imagery and AI-driven analysis to monitor algal blooms dynamically, and although initially developed for a NASA competition in the U.S., it shows potential for global application. Keywords: Machine learning; Inland Water; Algal Bloom; Remote Sensing; Data Fusion; Water Quality 1. Introduction Algal blooms are becoming the greatest inland water quality threat to public health and aquatic ecosystems that can degrade water quality to a greater extent than many chemicals (Brooks et al., 2016). Human nutrient loading and climate change (warming, altered rainfall) synergistically enhance cyanobacterial blooms in aquatic ecosystems (Paerl and Paul, 2012). Excessive nutrient loads in many cases comes from agricultural, industrial and other sources (Novotny, 2011). Phenology and trends of chlorophyll-a and cyanobacterial blooms are established (Matthews, 2014).

Resilient road infrastructure is a cornerstone of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Yet a primary indicator of network functionality and resilience is critically lacking: a comprehensive global baseline of road surface information. Here, we overcome this gap by applying a deep learning framework to a global mosaic of Planetscope satellite imagery from 2020 and 2024. The result is the first global multi-temporal dataset of road pavedness and width for 9.2 million km of critical arterial roads, achieving 95.5% coverage where nearly half the network was previously unclassified. This dataset reveals a powerful multi-scale geography of human development. At the planetary scale, we show that the rate of change in pavedness is a robust proxy for a country's development trajectory (correlation with HDI = 0.65). At the national scale, we quantify how unpaved roads constitute a fragile backbone for economic connectivity. We further synthesize our data into a global Humanitarian Passability Matrix with direct implications for humanitarian logistics. At the local scale, case studies demonstrate the framework's versatility: in Ghana, road quality disparities expose the spatial outcomes of governance; in Pakistan, the data identifies infrastructure vulnerabilities to inform climate resilience planning. Together, this work delivers both a foundational dataset and a multi-scale analytical framework for monitoring global infrastructure, from the dynamics of national development to the realities of local governance, climate adaptation, and equity. Unlike traditional proxies such as nighttime lights, which reflect economic activity, road surface data directly measures the physical infrastructure that underpins prosperity and resilience - at higher spatial resolution.

Origin-Destination (OD) flow matrices are critical for urban mobility analysis, supporting traffic forecasting, infrastructure planning, and policy design. Existing methods face two key limitations: (1) reliance on costly auxiliary features (e.g., Points of Interest, socioeconomic statistics) with limited spatial coverage, and (2) fragility to spatial topology changes, where reordering urban regions disrupts the structural coherence of generated flows. We propose Sat2Flow, a structure-aware diffusion framework that generates structurally coherent OD flows using only satellite imagery. Our approach employs a multi-kernel encoder to capture diverse regional interactions and a permutation-aware diffusion process that maintains consistency across regional orderings. Through joint contrastive training linking satellite features with OD patterns and equivariant diffusion training enforcing structural invariance, Sat2Flow ensures topological robustness under arbitrary regional reindexing. Experiments on real-world datasets show that Sat2Flow outperforms physics-based and data-driven baselines in accuracy while preserving flow distributions and spatial structures under index permutations. Sat2Flow offers a globally scalable solution for OD flow generation in data-scarce environments, eliminating region-specific auxiliary data dependencies while maintaining structural robustness for reliable mobility modeling.

Increasing climate change and habitat loss are driving unprecedented shifts in species distributions. Conservation professionals urgently need timely, high-resolution predictions of biodiversity risks, especially in ecologically diverse regions like Africa. We propose EcoCast, a spatio-temporal model designed for continual biodiversity and climate risk forecasting. Utilizing multisource satellite imagery, climate data, and citizen science occurrence records, EcoCast predicts near-term (monthly to seasonal) shifts in species distributions through sequence-based transformers that model spatio-temporal environmental dependencies. The architecture is designed with support for continual learning to enable future operational deployment with new data streams. Our pilot study in Africa shows promising improvements in forecasting distributions of selected bird species compared to a Random Forest baseline, highlighting EcoCast's potential to inform targeted conservation policies. By demonstrating an end-to-end pipeline from multi-modal data ingestion to operational forecasting, EcoCast bridges the gap between cutting-edge machine learning and biodiversity management, ultimately guiding data-driven strategies for climate resilience and ecosystem conservation throughout Africa.

World models have shown potential in artificial intelligence by predicting and reasoning about world states beyond direct observations. However, existing approaches are predominantly evaluated in synthetic environments or constrained scene settings, limiting their validation in real-world contexts with broad spatial coverage and complex semantics. Meanwhile, remote sensing applications urgently require spatial reasoning capabilities for disaster response and urban planning. This paper bridges these gaps by introducing the first framework for world modeling in remote sensing. We formulate remote sensing world modeling as direction-conditioned spatial extrapolation, where models generate semantically consistent adjacent image tiles given a central observation and directional instruction. To enable rigorous evaluation, we develop RSWISE (Remote Sensing World-Image Spatial Evaluation), a benchmark containing 1,600 evaluation tasks across four scenarios: general, flood, urban, and rural. RSWISE combines visual fidelity assessment with instruction compliance evaluation using GPT-4o as a semantic judge, ensuring models genuinely perform spatial reasoning rather than simple replication. Afterwards, we present RemoteBAGEL, a unified multimodal model fine-tuned on remote sensing data for spatial extrapolation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RemoteBAGEL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on RSWISE.

Precipitation nowcasting, key for early warning of disasters, currently relies on computationally expensive and restrictive methods that limit access to many countries. To overcome this challenge, we propose precipitation nowcasting using satellite imagery with physics constraints for improved accuracy and physical consistency. We use a novel physics-informed dual neural operator (PIANO) structure to enforce the fundamental equation of advection-diffusion during training to predict satellite imagery using a PINN loss. Then, we use a generative model to convert satellite images to radar images, which are used for precipitation nowcasting. Compared to baseline models, our proposed model shows a notable improvement in moderate (4mm/h) precipitation event prediction alongside short-term heavy (8mm/h) precipitation event prediction. It also demonstrates low seasonal variability in predictions, indicating robustness for generalization. This study suggests the potential of the PIANO and serves as a good baseline for physics-informed precipitation nowcasting.

Effective weed management is crucial for improving agricultural productivity, as weeds compete with crops for vital resources like nutrients and water. Accurate maps of weed management methods are essential for policymakers to assess farmer practices, evaluate impacts on vegetation health, biodiversity, and climate, as well as ensure compliance with policies and subsidies. However, monitoring weed management methods is challenging as they commonly rely on ground-based field surveys, which are often costly, time-consuming and subject to delays. In order to tackle this problem, we leverage earth observation data and Machine Learning (ML). Specifically, we developed separate ML models using Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope satellite time series data, respectively, to classify four distinct weed management methods (Mowing, Tillage, Chemical-spraying, and No practice) in orchards. The findings demonstrate the potential of ML-driven remote sensing to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of weed management mapping in orchards.