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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">1866-3591</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2026-57</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Democratizing planetary-scale analysis: An ultra-lightweight Earth embedding database for accurate and flexible global land monitoring</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chen</surname>
<given-names>Shuang</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wang</surname>
<given-names>Jie</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yuan</surname>
<given-names>Shuai</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Jiayang</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7717-3838</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Xia</surname>
<given-names>Yu</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Liao</surname>
<given-names>Yuanhong</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6123-7391</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wei</surname>
<given-names>Junbo</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yuan</surname>
<given-names>Jincheng</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Xu</surname>
<given-names>Xiaoqing</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhu</surname>
<given-names>Xiaolin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhu</surname>
<given-names>Peng</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7835-3971</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Hongsheng</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhou</surname>
<given-names>Yuyu</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Fu</surname>
<given-names>Haohuan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Huang</surname>
<given-names>Huabing</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff6">
<sup>6</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chen</surname>
<given-names>Bin</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3496-2876</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff7">
<sup>7</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff8">
<sup>8</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Dai</surname>
<given-names>Fan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff8">
<sup>8</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Gong</surname>
<given-names>Peng</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff8">
<sup>8</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff9">
<sup>9</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Department of Geography, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen 518000, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua  University, Beijing 100084, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Shenzhen, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff6">
<label>6</label>
<addr-line>School of Geospatial Engineering and Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff7">
<label>7</label>
<addr-line>Department of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff8">
<label>8</label>
<addr-line>Institute for Climate and Carbon Neutrality, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff9">
<label>9</label>
<addr-line>Department of Earth Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>25</day>
<month>02</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>35</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Shuang Chen et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-57/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-57/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-57/essd-2026-57.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-57/essd-2026-57.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>The rapid evolution of satellite-borne Earth Observation (EO) systems has fundamentally revolutionized terrestrial monitoring, yielding comprehensive petabyte-scale archives. However, the immense computational resources and storage volumes required for global-scale analysis often preclude widespread use by many research teams, hindering broader scientific adoption and the execution of planetary-scale studies. To address these barriers, we present the Embedded Seamless Data (ESD), an ultra-lightweight, 30-m global Earth embedding database spanning the 25-year period from 2000 to 2024.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;By transforming high-dimensional, multi-sensor observations from the Landsat series (5, 7, 8, and 9) and MODIS Terra into information-dense, quantized latent vectors, ESD distils essential geophysical and semantic features into a unified latent space. Utilizing the ESDNet architecture and Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ), the dataset achieves a transformative ~340-fold reduction in data volume compared to raw daily archives. This compression allows the entire global land surface for a single year to be encapsulated within approximately 2.4 TB, enabling decadal-scale global analysis on standard local workstations.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Rigorous validation demonstrates that ESD maintains high reconstructive fidelity to the original reflectance values across the spectral dimension, achieving a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.0130 (averaged over six spectral bands, including Blue, Green, Red, NIR, SWIR1, and SWIR2), a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.0179, and a Correlation Coefficient (CC) of 0.8543. By condensing the annual phenological cycle into 12 temporal latent steps, the embeddings provide inherent denoising effects and a semantically organized latent space that outperforms raw reflectance data in downstream land-cover classification tasks, achieving a comparable and even higher overall accuracy of 79.74 % than the 76.92 % obtained using raw sensor fusion data on globally distributed land cover sample sets. With robust few-shot learning capabilities and longitudinal consistency across 25 years, the ESD product provides a versatile foundation for democratizing planetary-scale Earth system research and advancing next-generation geospatial artificial intelligence.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="35"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee</funding-source>
<award-id>STG2/P-705/24-R, HKU17616825</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs2">
<funding-source>Croucher Foundation</funding-source>
<award-id>CAS22902</award-id>
<award-id>CAS22HU01</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
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<back>
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