EVENTS

Satellite remote sensing enables a wide range of downstream applications, including habitat mapping, carbon accounting, and strategies for conservation and sustainable land use. However, satellite time series are voluminous and often corrupted, making them challenging to use: the scientific community’s ability to extract actionable insights is often constrained by the scarcity of labelled training datasets and the computational burden of processing temporal data.

The presentation will introduce TESSERA (Time-series Embeddings of Surface Spectra for Earth Representation and Analysis), an open foundation model that preserves spectral-temporal signals in 128-dimensional latent representations at 10-meter resolution globally. The model uses self-supervised learning to summarise petabytes of Earth observation data. TESSERA is shown to be label-efficient and closely matches or outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives. By preserving temporal phenological signals that are typically lost in conventional approaches, TESSERA enables new insights into ecosystem dynamics, agricultural food systems, and environmental change detection. Moreover, the open-source implementation supports reproducibility and extensibility, while the privacy-preserving design allows researchers to maintain data sovereignty. To current knowledge, TESSERA is unprecedented in its ease of use, scale, and accuracy: no other foundation model provides analysis-ready outputs, is open, and delivers global, annual coverage at 10m resolution using only spectral-temporal features at pixel level.

This session is part of a two-session series, providing the theoretical introduction to TESSERA. The second session, a hands-on workshop, will be held on February 2nd, 2026.

Institutions

• AI for Good