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The first global agricultural field boundary map at 10m resolution

Summary

Researchers release the first global dataset of agricultural field boundaries at 10m resolution for 2024 and 2025, comprising 3.17 billion polygons across 241 countries. Using a U-Net model on Sentinel-2 imagery, it achieves a mean pixel-level recall of 0.85 validated in 24 countries.

SourcearXiv Computer VisionAuthor: Caleb Robinson, Gedeon Muhawenayo, Subash Khanal, Zhanpei Fang, Isaac Corley, Ana M. T\'arano, Lyndon Estes, Jennifer Marcus, Nathan Jacobs, Hannah Kerner, Inbal Becker-Reshef, Juan M. Lavista Ferres
The first global agricultural field boundary map at 10m resolution
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[2605.11055] The first global agricultural field boundary map at 10m resolution

[Submitted on 11 May 2026]

Title:The first global agricultural field boundary map at 10m resolution

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Abstract:The agricultural field is the natural unit at which crops are planted, managed, regulated, and reported, yet most global remote-sensing products for agriculture are only available at the pixel level. While some high-quality field-level data products exist, they come from parcel registries covering only parts of Europe or from ML-derived products for individual countries. No openly available, globally consistent map of agricultural field boundaries exists to date. Here we present the first global field boundary dataset at 10\,m resolution for the years 2024 and 2025, comprising 3.17 billion remote-sensing field polygons (1.62 B in 2024 and 1.55 B in 2025) across 241 countries and territories, produced by applying a U-Net segmentation model trained on the Fields of The World dataset to cloud-free Sentinel-2 mosaics. Validated against ground-truth field boundaries in 24 countries, the map achieved a mean pixel-level recall of 0.85 with 14 countries exceeding 0.90. Evaluation against full-country ground-truth datasets in Austria, Latvia, and Finland yielded F1 scores of 0.89, 0.88, and 0.74, respectively. Because reference data for global validation is inherently incomplete, we accompanied the map with a 500 m confidence layer that identifies regions where predictions are reliable. We release the dataset openly as three global maps: the confidence-thresholded default field boundary dataset, the full unfiltered dataset, and the continuous-valued confidence raster. These maps provide the first globally consistent field-level unit of analysis for crop monitoring, food security, and downstream agricultural science.

Subjects:

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Cite as: arXiv:2605.11055 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2605.11055v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.11055

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Caleb Robinson [view email] [v1] Mon, 11 May 2026 15:54:42 UTC (14,551 KB)

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Key points

  • First global field boundary map at 10m resolution covering 241 countries and territories
  • Dataset includes 3.17 billion polygons from 2024 and 2025, generated via U-Net on Sentinel-2
  • Validated in 24 countries with mean recall 0.85; 14 countries exceed 0.90
  • Openly released with confidence layer and three map types for crop monitoring and food security

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