The first global agricultural field boundary map at 10m resolution
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Abstract (arXiv)
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.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 11 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.
Builds on
11 of 42 references.
References · 11
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- 2024Generalization Enhancement Strategies to Enable Cross-year Cropland Mapping with Convolutional Neural Networks Trained Using Historical Samplescited by 6
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- 2024A region-wide, multi-year set of crop field boundary labels for Africacited by 4
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.