# SSL4Eco: A Global Seasonal Dataset for Geospatial Foundation Models in Ecology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18256 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18256/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 102 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [SatMAE: Pre-training Transformers for Temporal and Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08051/) (2022)
- [Functional Map of the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07846/) (2017)
- [BigEarthNet: A Large-Scale Benchmark Archive For Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06148/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Self-supervised Learning: Algorithms, Applications, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05712/) (2023)
- [Geography-Aware Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09980/) (2020)
- [GeoCLIP: Clip-Inspired Alignment between Locations and Images for Effective Worldwide Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16020/) (2023)
- [CROMA: Remote Sensing Representations with Contrastive Radar-Optical Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00566/) (2023)
- [SatlasPretrain: A Large-Scale Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15660/) (2022)
- [SatCLIP: Global, General-Purpose Location Embeddings with Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17179/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models for Generalist Geospatial Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18660/) (2023)
- [Panoptic Segmentation of Satellite Image Time Series with Convolutional Temporal Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07933/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Learning in Remote Sensing: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13188/) (2022)
- [GEO-Bench: Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03831/) (2023)
- [Lightweight, Pre-trained Transformers for Remote Sensing Timeseries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14065/) (2023)
- [SEN12MS -- A Curated Dataset of Georeferenced Multi-Spectral Sentinel-1/2 Imagery for Deep Learning and Data Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07789/) (2019)
- [A high-resolution canopy height model of the Earth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08322/) (2022)
- [SSL4EO-S12: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal, Multi-Temporal Dataset for Self-Supervised Learning in Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07044/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [RSEdit: Text-Guided Image Editing for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13708/) (2026)
- [MOMO: Mars Orbital Model Foundation Model for Mars Orbital Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02719/) (2026)
- [REMSA: Foundation Model Selection for Remote Sensing via a Constraint-Aware Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17442/) (2025)
- [Pretrain Where? Investigating How Pretraining Data Diversity Impacts Geospatial Foundation Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21104/) (2026)
- [Toward a foundation model for forest point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24787/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the exacerbation of the biodiversity and climate crises, macroecological pursuits such as global biodiversity mapping become more urgent. Remote sensing offers a wealth of Earth observation data for ecological studies, but the scarcity of labeled datasets remains a major challenge. Recently, self-supervised learning has enabled learning representations from unlabeled data, triggering the development of pretrained geospatial models with generalizable features. However, these models are often trained on datasets biased toward areas of high human activity, leaving entire ecological regions underrepresented. Additionally, while some datasets attempt to address seasonality through multi-date imagery, they typically follow calendar seasons rather than local phenological cycles. To better capture vegetation seasonality at a global scale, we propose a simple phenology-informed sampling strategy and introduce corresponding SSL4Eco, a multi-date Sentinel-2 dataset, on which we train an existing model with a season-contrastive objective. We compare representations learned from SSL4Eco against other datasets on diverse ecological downstream tasks and demonstrate that our straightforward sampling method consistently improves representation quality, highlighting the importance of dataset construction. The model pretrained on SSL4Eco reaches state of the art performance on 7 out of 8 downstream tasks spanning (multi-label) classification and regression. We release our code, data, and model weights to support macroecological and computer vision research at https://github.com/PlekhanovaElena/ssl4eco.