Towards accessible smallholder crop classification in the groundnut basin of Senegal

Abstract Crop type mapping is a critical lever for decision making in smallholder food systems, yet high cost and expertise requirements of developing remote sensing-driven maps as well as need for recurrent data are persistent barriers to incorporating geospatial tools into decision making. To address this gap, we establish a three-part framework to evaluate crop type mapping: (1) performance, (2) temporal transferability, and (3) accessibility. We evaluate geospatial foundation model embeddings (TESSERA and AlphaEarth) against traditional baselines in Senegal’s groundnut basin. We find that the embedding-based approaches, in particular TESSERA, best fulfill these criteria. The TESSERA-based method shows a 78% reduction in both compute compared to a timeseries approach, a reduction in need for custom feature generation, and 28% higher relative accuracy (an absolute improvement of approximately 0.10 weighted F 1) in one crop type classification temporal transfer test. By reducing the reliance on training data, computational resource use, and expertise for data processing, this approach shows potential to contribute to improved smallholder crop type classification.