Geospatial embeddings detect old-growth forests but buffered spatial validation narrows their advantage over Sentinel features

Abstract

Old-growth forests develop over centuries under minimal anthropogenic disturbance, producing structurally complex and biodiverse stands. In Europe, protecting them requires mapping that is accurate for individual forest parcels yet deployable continent-wide. Geospatial foundation model (GFM) embeddings enable label-scarce land classification, but their value for old-growth detection remains unknown. Here, we map old-growth forests across 211,893 ha of Romania's Southern Carpathians, a beech-spruce landscape typical of the Alpine Biogeographic Region. We construct high-confidence, expert-informed reference labels for old-growth and non-old-growth parcels. We add AlphaEarth, TESSERA v2 and Sentinel-1/2 features to a common baseline of topographic and human-access predictors, then compare them under spatially blocked validation with and without 10 km train-test buffers to limit residual autocorrelation. With buffering, GFM and Sentinel-1/2 predictors increase precision-recall AUC by 0.21-0.25 [95% CIs: 0.15-0.34] relative to baseline, indicating spectral data contain a spatially robust old-growth signal. With a PR-AUC of 0.84 [0.79-0.88], TESSERA outperforms Sentinel-1/2 (+0.08 [+0.05 to +0.11]) and AlphaEarth (+0.08 [+0.04 to +0.12]) under unbuffered spatial validation. At a 10 km buffer, however, this advantage narrows to +0.04 [-0.01 to +0.11] and +0.03 [-0.04 to +0.10], intervals consistent with no difference. At 10 m resolution, convolutional neural networks add no benefit over pixel-based XGBoost. Comparisons with four national- and continental-scale products show the importance of non-old-growth labels, and reveal 81% agreement between our predictions and a field-calibrated map. We conclude that buffered spatial validation is vital when transferring old-growth detection models to unseen landscapes, and provide our labels and predictions for future work.