EarthScape: A Multimodal Dataset for Surficial Geologic Mapping and Earth Surface Analysis

Abstract

Surficial geologic (SG) maps are essential for understanding surface processes and supporting infrastructure planning, but current workflows are labor-intensive and difficult to scale. We introduce EarthScape, an AI-ready multimodal dataset for SG mapping that integrates digital elevation models, aerial imagery, multi-scale terrain features, and hydrologic and infrastructure vector data within a unified, reproducible pipeline. We report baseline benchmarks across single-modality, multi-scale, and multimodal configurations. Our experiments show that terrain features provide the most reliable predictive signal, while raw spectral and elevation inputs degrade substantially under cross-region evaluation. EarthScape offers a geographically compact, but modality-rich benchmark for multimodal fusion, domain adaptation, and surface modeling. EarthScape is available for direct download at https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kgs_data/16/, and code is available at https://github.com/masseygeo/earthscape.