AG-STELLA: Spatio-Temporal Learning for Water-related Agricultural Land Use Activity Mapping with AlphaEarth

AG-STELLA: Spatio-Temporal Learning for Water-related Agricultural Land Use Activity Mapping with AlphaEarth

Nibir Chandra Mandal, Oishee Bintey Hoque, Kyle Luong, Samarth Swarup, Kirti Rajagopalan, Mandy L Wilson, Abhijin Adiga, Madhav Marathe

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI and Social Good. Pages 7337-7345. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/816

Accurate mapping of agricultural land use activity, particularly long-term transition from cropland to pasture and short-term transition between cropland to fallow land, is essential for sustainable water management, drought response, and food-system resilience which directly supports United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG-2 and SDG-8). However, reliable agricultural land use activity mapping is challenging due to spectral ambiguity, temporal irregularities, severe class imbalance, and limited generalization across agricultural regions. In this work, we propose AG-STELLA, a knowledge guided spatio-temporal model that (i) captures temporal changes of agricultural lands using pretrained spatio-temporal transformers; (ii) integrates geospatial context using AlphaEarth embedding; (iii) introduces a temporal transition latent space with temporal consistency constraints; (iv) employs guidance through hydroclimatic consistency; and (v) uses a land use-aware gated decoder to improve robustness across regions. Through experimentation across three water-stressed U.S. states, we show consistent gains over baseline vision and foundation models, achieving up to 27% F1-score improvement for pasture (minority class) and 16% overall. We further show the robustness across heterogeneous regions through cross-state transfer learning, where AG-STELLA consistently outperforms foundation model baselines and achieve up to 82.3% F1-score for fallow land with a 9.6% improvement over the best foundation model. Code: https://github.com/Nibir088/AG-STELLA
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Computer Vision
Machine Learning: Machine Learning
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications