GEO-Bench-2:#

The emergence of Geospatial Foundation Models (GeoFMs) holds great promise for advancing Earth Observation (EO), enabling more general and scalable solutions for a variety of tasks. However, the rapidly evolving nature of this field has meant that evaluation protocols have been difficult to standardize.

GEO-Bench-2 is an effort to address this challenge by providing a comprehensive and community-focused benchmarking framework tailored to various EO applications. Expanding upon its predecessor, this framework is designed to facilitate consistent, insightful, and fair comparison of GeoFMs.


What GEO-Bench-2 Offers#

We aim to simplify and standardize the evaluation process through several key features:

  • Diverse and Permissively Licensed Data: We include a curated selection of 19 datasets covering core EO tasks, including classification, segmentation, regression, object detection, and instance segmentation, ensuring broad usability.

  • Targeted Evaluation via “Capabilities”: Datasets are grouped into “capabilities” based on shared characteristics (e.g., resolution, band usage, temporality). This feature supports flexible benchmarking, allowing users to assess a model’s strengths on specific types of EO data.

  • Robust Metrics and Efficiency: We utilize the normalized interquartile mean (IQM) for more robust model comparison and incorporate subsampling strategies to help make large-scale evaluation more efficient.

  • Ease of Use with TerraTorch: Integration with the TerraTorch open-source toolkit. However, all datasets and datamodules can also be used independently of TerraTorch

Installation#

pip install geobenchv2

Dataset Overview#

Dataset

Task

Modalities

Train/Val/Test Samples

# Classes

License

Citation

BigEarthNetV2

Multi-label land cover classification

Sentinel-1 SAR (VV,VH) + Sentinel-2 Optical

20000 / 4000 / 4000

19 (multi-label)

CDLA-Permissive-1.0

Clasen et al. 2025

TreeSatAI

Tree species classification

Sentinel-2 Time Series

20000 / 4000 / 4000

13

CC-BY-4.0

Ahlswede et al. 2023

m-so2sat

Climate zone classification

Sentinel-2 Optical

19992 / 986 / 986

17

CC-BY-4.0

So2Sat LCZ42

m-forestnet

Tree species classification

Landsat 8

6464 / 989 / 989

12

CC-BY-4.0

ForestNet

BioMassters

Biomass regression

Sentinel-1 SAR (VV,VH) + Sentinel-2 Optical

4011 / 1739 / 2776

Continuous

CC-BY-4.0

Nascetti et al. 2023

CaFFe

Glacier zone segmentation

Sentinel-1 SAR

4000 / 1000 / 2000

4

CC-BY-4.0

Gourmelon et al. 2022

CloudSEN12

Cloud/shadow segmentation

Sentinel-1 SAR + Sentinel-2 Optical

4000 / 535 / 975

4

CC0

Aybar et al. 2022

Burn Scars

Burned area segmentation

HLS (Landsat 8/9 + Sentinel-2)

524 / 160 / 120

2 (binary)

CC-BY-4.0

Phillips et al. 2024

Dynamic EarthNet

Land cover semantic segmentation

Sentinel-2 (10 bands) + Planet (4 bands)

700 / 100 / 200

7

CC-BY-4.0

Toker et al. 2022

FLAIR2

Land cover semantic segmentation

Aerial RGB+NIR + DEM

4049 / 1022 / 3022

13

Open License 2.0

Garioud et al. 2023

m-FoTW

Field boundary segmentation

Sentinel-2 Optical

4000 / 1000 / 2000

2 (binary)

CC-BY-SA

Kerner et al. 2025

KuroSiwo

Flood segmentation

Sentinel-1 SAR + DEM + Slope

4000 / 1000 / 2000

4

MIT

Bountos et al. 2024

PASTIS (R)

Crop type + parcel segmentation

Sentinel-1 (asc/desc) + Sentinel-2 time series

1455 / 482 / 496

19 (18 crops + bg)

CC BY 4.0

Garnot et al. 2022

SpaceNet2

Building footprint segmentation

WorldView VHR Optical RGB

5186 / 1461 / 2961

2 (binary)

CC-BY-SA-4.0

Van Etten et al. 2018

SpaceNet7

Building segmentation/tracking

Planet RGB time series

3500 / 652 / 1152

2 (binary)

CC-BY-SA-4.0

Van Etten et al. 2021

EverWatch

Bird object detection

Aerial RGB

4429 / 500 / 196

9

CC0-1.0

Garner et al. 2024

m-nzcattle

Cattle object detection

Aerial RGB

524 / 66 / 65

2

CC-BY-4.0

NZ Cattle

Substation

Power substation segmentation

Sentinel-2 Optical + OSM

4000 / 500 / 500

2 (binary)

CC-BY-4.0 / ODbL 1.0

Lindsay et al. 2024

So2Sat

Local Climate Zones

Sentinel-1 SAR (VV,VH) + Sentinel-2 Optical

19992/986/986

17

CC-BY-4.0

Lacoste et al. 2023

Geographical Distribution of Datasets#

Global Sample Distribution

Global Sample Distribution#

Geographical Distribution across Continents#

Global Sample Distribution Continets

Global Coverage Distribution Continets#