Field Boundaries of South America
This technical note describes Trazo, a framework for automatically delineating agricultural field boundaries from satellite imagery and scaling that delineation to new geographies. This framework lays out how to create, target, and sample training annotations to produce tailored deep learning segmentation models. It includes a scalable inference pipeline to map fields across South America, methods for creating use case-specific models with training and fine-tuning, and several test sets for evaluating annotation quality and model performance across landscapes and commodities. The aim of this work is to provide open, reliable plot-level data that strengthens supply chain traceability and supports faster action against deforestation.
Delineating agricultural field boundaries is key to building sustainable supply chains, as boundaries link agricultural products directly to their sites of production and serve as informative units of analysis for land use change. However, manually collecting boundary data from the ground or from high-resolution satellite images is costly and slow, limiting its application at scale. This technical note describes Trazo, an iterative framework that addresses this problem by incorporating new expert-annotated field boundary data into deep learning segmentation models for automated delineation from satellite imagery. We developed the method using high-quality, diverse training data from 17 soy-producing ecoregions in South America together with seasonal Sentinel-2 imagery, producing a suite of tailored segmentation models, called Trazo, and a pipeline that deploys them at scale. The first release maps nearly 11 million field boundaries across South America. The aim is to provide open, reliable plot-level data and tools that help supply chain actors strengthen traceability, assess where deforestation and ecosystem conversion are occurring within their supply chains, and comply with sustainability commitments and regulations such as the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
