Better Together

Code and data to reproduce all results from the paper Better Together: Evaluating the Complementarity of Earth Embedding Models from Thijs L van der Plas, Jacob JW Bakermans, Vishal Nedungadi, Gabrielė Tijūnaitytė, Marc Rußwurm, Ioannis N Athanasiadis.

Instructions:

• All figures and analyses are created in the notebooks (which use the modules). See below for details.
• Data is included in the data/ folder. The data is provided with a CC-BY-SA license.
• There are 2 zip files that should be unzipped in data/geoclip/
• The python packages are listed in the .yml files (one with and one without builds).
• Some functions might require a GEE API key, but this can otherwise be disabled for most functionalities.

Guide to notebooks (that generate figures/tables):

• Explain embeddings: contains most analyses.
• Explore downstream tasks: contains 1 supp fig.
• Sample locations dataset: contains supp figs regarding data sampling.
• Spatial relationship task: contains analyses regarding spatial scale.
• Task agnostic overlap: contains CCA/CKA analysis.

Citation:

@misc{vanderplas2026bettertogetherevaluatingcomplementarity,
      title={Better Together: Evaluating the Complementarity of Earth Embedding Models}, 
      author={Thijs L van der Plas and Jacob JW Bakermans and Vishal Nedungadi and Gabrielė Tijūnaitytė and Marc Rußwurm and Ioannis N Athanasiadis},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2605.18667},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18667}, 
}