GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

Abstract

Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis. New AI agents can be a helpful tool, but no benchmark exists to evaluate AI agents that automate environmental geospatial workflows through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. The benchmark comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable geospatial API that serves three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate nine frontier and open-weight LLMs, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. Results manifest that (1) Claude Sonnet 4 achieves the highest capability at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed closely by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, while no other model exceeds 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11.6x lower cost; and (3) structured tool calling against a real API provides a more discriminative measure of real-world agent capability, with mean accuracies 25-35 percentage points below those reported on general-purpose GIS benchmarks.