TerraNostra-Bench: Benchmarking Spatial Downscaling and Temporal Rollout for Global 1-km Land-Use Reconstruction

Abstract

Uncertainty in the terrestrial carbon cycle remains a major constraint in climate projections, partly due to imperfect land surface representations in Earth system models. We propose a data-driven framework for high-resolution land-use reconstruction, treated as a semantic-segmentation task, that combines coarse-resolution scenario data and climate classification with static geophysical features to produce annual land-use maps at 1 km resolution. We introduce TerraNostra-Bench, a change-aware evaluation protocol that separates spatial downscaling from autoregressive temporal rollout and scores models on the rare land-use-change pixels rather than the dominant static background. Using it, we compare convolutional (U-Net) and transformer (Swin) backbones in autoregressive and non-autoregressive schemes against persistence, linear, and shallow convolutional baselines. The autoregressive prior is the most informative input yet accumulates error over long rollouts: autoregressive models lose 5.7-7.2 accuracy points over 13 years, against 2.2-2.8 for non-autoregressive models. This trade-off is governed by the autoregressive choice rather than the backbone. It can be tuned by an inference-time prior-trust threshold that requires no retraining and by the training-time weighting of reconstruction and change objectives; the two levers trace complementary frontiers, with calibration recovering up to 10 accuracy points while keeping change sensitivity above the persistence floor. Extrapolating beyond the training window, backward to 1955-1959 and forward to 2015-2019 under scenario forcing, the models retain most of their in-window skill and show the same trade-off, indicating it is intrinsic to the design. This work provides the methodological foundation and evaluation surface for a forthcoming temporally continuous land-use product.