TESSERA, a pixelwise geospatial foundation model

TESSERA is an open and pixel-wise foundation model for multi-modal (Sentinel-1/2) earth observation time series that learns robust, label-efficient embeddings.

Our goal with TESSERA is to make manipulating global satellite intelligence as easy as conventional programming tasks are. Towards this we release global, annual, 10m, pixel-wise embeddings together with open weights and code and lightweight adaptation heads. We also develop practical tooling for large-scale retrieval and inference at planetary scale.

As with any good foundation model, there are a staggering array of downstream tasks which can benefit. TESSERA embeddings deliver state-of-the-art accuracy with high label efficiency across diverse classification, segmentation, and regression tasks.

Activity

Evidence synthesis at the DEFRA science conference, TESSERA transcoding and building a new SPA, OpenStreetMap/DuckDB bindings in OxCaml, and early thoughts on vibecoding etiquette.
How we restructured TESSERA's geospatial embeddings from millions of individual numpy files into sharded Zarr v3 stores for efficient HTTP streaming, enabling everything from single-pixel mobile lookups to regional-scale analysis with just a couple of range requests.
A little screencast of a fully browser based streaming interface to manipulate TESSERA embeddings. All the classification and UMAPs run directly in a browser, with no server required aside from static HTTP serving of the embeddings!
Summary of the Nine Recommendations and Biodiversity Monitoring Standards Framework papers from the NAS/Royal Society US-UK Forum in summer 2025, and how they connect to my work on collective knowledge systems, TESSERA, and evidence synthesis.
Mark Elvers. Mainly for my future reference here is a walk-through of the Tessera pipeline.
Trip report from the Indian AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, covering the massive expo, a conversation with Yann LeCun, a hackathon/talk at IIT-Delhi, networking at the British High Commission, and reflections on the summit declaration's shift from safety to progress and equitable access.
First TESSERA hackathon held at the Indian AI Impact Summit in Delhi, exploring integration with IIT-Delhi's CoRE Stack for geospatial analysis and testing TESSERA labeling workflows.
Growing the Ceph cluster for TESSERA embeddings, a Lego brainstorming session for the Evidence TAP, hosting Echo Labs from ARIA, and Shane's IUCN Red List seminar.
Mark Elvers. The Tessera pipeline is written in Python. What would it take to have an OCaml version?
Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez. Introduction This is quite a large update as it includes everything I’ve done for the past two weeks. I’ll talk about the LCZ classification and road mapping projects as well as my first actual experience with Claude Code and a cool toy example. LCZ Classification It turns out that getting the r…
Andrew Gonzalez, Tom August et al. — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
OxCaml LabsJan 2025