Preservation & Provenance
Concept
open source
WATCH: Wide-Area Archaeological Site Tracking for Change Detection
Monitoring archaeological sites at scale is vital for protecting cultural heritage, yet pinpointing when disturbances occur remains difficult because visual cues are subtle and ground-truth data are sparse. We introduce WATCH, a framework for month-level change-event localization over PlanetScope satellite mosaics (2017-2024, 4.7 m/px) that supports three complementary scoring approaches: (i) Temporal Embedding Distance (TED), a training-free method that scores month-to-month deviations from a local temporal reference; (ii) Self-Supervised Change Detection (SSCD), an ensemble of reconstruction, forecasting, and latent-novelty signals; and (iii) a Weakly Supervised (WS) temporal localization model trained with sparse event-month labels. We benchmark WATCH on 1,943 archaeological sites in Afghanistan using embeddings from six foundation models (CLIP, GeoRSCLIP, SatMAE, Prithvi-EO-2.0, DINOv3, and Satlas-Pretrain) alongside a handcrafted spectral and texture baseline, and assess cross-regional generalization on sites in Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt. The unsupervised approaches (TED, SSCD) consistently outperform the weakly supervised alternative. TED with SatMAE achieves the highest exact-month recall (55% at m=0), while TED with GeoRSCLIP, CLIP, or Satlas-Pretrain reaches 92.5% within a three-month tolerance (m=3). Handcrafted features remain competitive for exact-month detection under weak supervision. Our directional margin analysis reveals systematic temporal biases: SSCD paired with GeoRSCLIP or Prithvi-EO-2.0 exhibits the strongest early-warning profile, detecting anomalies before the recorded event, while TED favors confirmation-oriented detection after a change has materialized. These results show that satellite imagery combined with foundation-model embeddin
Health & Care
Concept
open source
FairHealth: An Open-Source Python Library for Trustworthy Healthcare AI in Low-Resource Settings
We present FairHealth, an open-source Python library that provides a unified, modular framework for trustworthy machine learning in healthcare applications, with particular focus on low-resource and low-income country (LMIC) settings such as Bangladesh. FairHealth addresses four critical gaps in existing healthcare AI toolkits: (1) the absence of integrated fairness auditing for biosignals and clinical tabular data; (2) the lack of privacy-preserving federated learning tools compatible with standard ML workflows; (3) missing explainability tools tailored for low-bandwidth clinical decision support; and (4) no existing toolkit covering Global South healthcare datasets. Built from five peer-reviewed research contributions, FairHealth provides six modules covering federated learning with homomorphic encryption (fairhealth.federated), intersectional fairness metrics (fairhealth.fairness), hybrid fuzzy-SHAP explainability (fairhealth.explain), multilingual dengue triage (fairhealth.lowresource), equitable disaster aid allocation (fairhealth.equity), and public dataset loaders (fairhealth.datasets). All datasets used are publicly available without institutional data use agreements. FairHealth is installable via pip install fairhealth(PyPI: pypi.org/project/fairhealth/) and available at https://github.com/Farjana-Yesmin/fairhealth.
Climate & Biosphere
Concept
open source
Low-Rank Adaptation of Geospatial Foundation Models for Wildfire Mapping Using Sentinel-2 Data
Wildfire burned-area mapping is essential for damage assessment, emissions modeling, and understanding fire-climate interactions across diverse ecological regions. Recent geospatial foundation models provide strong general-purpose representations for satellite imagery, yet there is still no clear understanding of how to efficiently adapt these models for downstream Earth observation tasks, particularly under geographic and temporal domain shift. This study evaluates three state-of-the-art Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) - Terramind, DINOv3, and Prithvi-v2 - for burned-area mapping across the United States and Canada using Sentinel-2 data. Leveraging 3,820 wildfire events from 2017-2023, we conduct spatial and temporal generalization tests across diverse biomes. We systematically compare full fine-tuning, decoder-only fine-tuning, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for adapting each model. Across all experiments, LoRA provides the strongest cross-domain generalization while updating less than 1% of parameters, demonstrating a favorable trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Prithvi-v2 with LoRA achieves the highest overall accuracy and the largest improvement compared to full fine-tuning. These findings indicate that geospatial foundation models, when adapted using lightweight parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA, offer a robust and scalable solution for large-scale burned-area mapping. Code is available at https://github.com/alishibli97/wildfire-lora-gfm.