Fields of the World: Mapping Every Field on Earth | Great Data Products with Jen Marcus & Isaac Corley
Jed Sundwall talks with Jen Marcus (VP of Strategic Innovation Programs) and Isaac Corley (Director of AI Research) of Taylor Geospatial about Fields of the World: an open, global map of agricultural field boundaries derived from satellite imagery with AI, released entirely in the open on Source Cooperative under a CC BY license.
Jen traces the origin story back to a 2024 gathering in St. Louis that set the project's order of operations: agree on a minimal, extensible schema first (Fiboa), then build a benchmark dataset, evaluate models, recommend an architecture, and ship the tooling. Isaac walks through what's actually in the global release — not just vector boundaries, but the input Sentinel-2 mosaics and raw pixel-level predictions behind them. The conversation closes on the hard part: the economics of sustaining open data products, the case for graduating the dataset into a "data trust," and a new push to fix how geospatial AI models get benchmarked.
Episode details with transcript at https://greatdataproducts.com/episodes/2026/05/marcus-corley-fields-of-the-world/
LINKS & RESOURCES
Taylor Geospatial: https://taylorgeospatial.org
Fields of the World: https://fieldsofthe.world
Fields of the World data (Source Cooperative): https://source.coop/ftw/global-data
Fiboa (field boundary schema): https://github.com/fiboa
TorchGeo: https://github.com/torchgeo/torchgeo
Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum: https://cloudnativegeo.org
CNG Forum 2026 (Snowbird, October): https://2026.cloudnativegeo.org
CNG London (June 23 — sold out): https://cloudnativegeo.org/events/cng-london/
"No One Knows the State of the Art in Geospatial Foundation Models": https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12678
"Data Science at the Singularity" by David Donoho: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00865
GUESTS
Jen Marcus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-marcus-b559091/
Isaac Corley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaaccorley/
ABOUT
Great Data Products is a live-stream webinar and podcast from Radiant Earth, a nonprofit focused on making data easier to access and use. Learn more and find our upcoming events at https://cloudnativegeo.org
#geospatial #opendata #AI #satelliteimagery #agriculture #machinelearning