Articles | Volume 18, issue 7
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-5375-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Democratizing planetary-scale analysis: an ultra-lightweight Earth embedding database for accurate and flexible global land monitoring
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- Final revised paper (published on 24 Jul 2026)
- Preprint (discussion started on 25 Feb 2026)
Interactive discussion
Status: closed
Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor
| : Report abuse
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RC1: 'Solid work that needs minor corrections', Zhengpeng Feng, 10 Mar 2026
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Shuang Chen, 01 Jun 2026
- AC2: 'Reply on RC1', Shuang Chen, 01 Jun 2026
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RC2: 'Comment on essd-2026-57', Anonymous Referee #2, 30 Apr 2026
- AC3: 'Reply on RC2', Shuang Chen, 01 Jun 2026
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RC3: 'Comment on essd-2026-57', Anonymous Referee #3, 18 May 2026
- AC4: 'Reply on RC3', Shuang Chen, 01 Jun 2026
Peer review completion
AR – Author's response | RR – Referee report | ED – Editor decision | EF – Editorial file upload
AR by Shuang Chen on behalf of the Authors (01 Jun 2026)
Author's response
Author's tracked changes
Manuscript
ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (02 Jun 2026) by Dalei Hao
RR by Zhengpeng Feng (08 Jun 2026)
RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (15 Jun 2026)
RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (03 Jul 2026)
ED: Publish as is (04 Jul 2026) by Dalei Hao
AR by Shuang Chen on behalf of the Authors (10 Jul 2026)
Manuscript
First off, I really enjoyed reading this manuscript. The work on Embedded Seamless Data (ESD) is quite impressive, and I think it addresses a real bottleneck in planetary-scale analysis. The ultra-lightweight design and the way it handles decadal-scale global land monitoring are definitely high-quality contributions. The overall framework is solid, but there are a few things that need to be cleaned up before it’s ready for publication.
The most critical thing I noticed is in Table 11, which provides the technical comparison between ESD and other existing Earth embedding databases. To be honest, there are some pretty clear errors in the technical specs listed for the competing products. I’d strongly recommend the authors take another look at that table and cross-check it with the comparison table in the " Earth Embeddings as Products: Taxonomy, Ecosystem, and Standardized Access" paper. Getting these details right is important for the credibility of the comparison, so please revise those rows to ensure the metrics and features for the other databases/models are accurately represented.
On a related note, when you talk about the multitask training strategy in Section 3.3, it would be great if you could briefly clarify how the loss weights (alpha, beta, and gamma) were tuned. You don't need a full sensitivity analysis, but just a sentence or two on whether they were empirically balanced or if there's a specific rationale behind their values would help reproducibility.