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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-1331-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Fusion of AlphaEarth Embeddings and Sentinel-1 Time-Series for Conflict-Related Urban Damage Mapping</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ślesiński</surname>
<given-names>Jakub</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Karwowska</surname>
<given-names>Kinga</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Lewińska</surname>
<given-names>Magdalena</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Department of Imagery Intelligence, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geodesy, Military University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>31</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-B3-2026</volume>
<fpage>1331</fpage>
<lpage>1338</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Jakub Ślesiński et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B3-2026/1331/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-1331-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B3-2026/1331/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-1331-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B3-2026/1331/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-1331-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B3-2026/1331/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-1331-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Conflict-related urban damage mapping requires methods that remain reliable when field access is limited, cloud cover is frequent, and urban conditions vary strongly. Sentinel-1 SAR time series provide systematic all-weather coverage, but SAR-only indices are still sensitive to speckle, acquisition geometry, and heterogeneous urban background. AlphaEarth Foundations embeddings offer a complementary feature space that may stabilize change detection by encoding broader semantic context. This study evaluates scalar fusion of AlphaEarth embedding change and Sentinel-1 change indices for building-level conflict damage mapping.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We first compare multiple AlphaEarth-based change metrics and retain Earth Mover&apos;s Distance (EMD) as the most suitable embedding-space indicator. We then combine EMD with Sentinel-1 indices through simple scalar fusion rules and evaluate the results on 75,825 reference building footprints from seven Ukrainian cities with damage rates ranging from 0.2% to 33.7%. The strongest transferable method, EMD+PWTT_w40, achieves mean building-level AUC 0.676, outperforming both PWTT alone (0.657) and EMD alone (0.593). A lightweight learned fusion gives only a small within-city gain (mean AUC 0.686) and degrades under leave-one-city-out transfer (0.614). Sensitivity analysis further shows that the transferred fusion weight remains stable, with w_EMD = 0.4 staying within 0.0028 AUC of the city-specific optimum on average.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;These results show that AlphaEarth and SAR capture complementary aspects of urban damage and that a simple scalar fusion rule can combine them effectively without sacrificing interpretability or transferability.</p>
</abstract>
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