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This paper assesses trending AI foundation models, especially emerging computer vision foundation models and their performance in natural landscape feature segmentation. While the term foundation model has quickly garnered interest from the geospatial domain, its definition remains vague. Hence, this paper will first introduce AI foundation models and their defining characteristics. Built upon the tremendous success achieved by Large Language Models (LLMs) as the foundation models for language tasks, this paper discusses the challenges of building foundation models for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) vision tasks. To evaluate the performance of large AI vision models, especially Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM), we implemented different instance segmentation pipelines that minimize the changes to SAM to leverage its power as a foundation model. A series of prompt strategies were developed to test SAM’s performance regarding its theoretical upper bound of predictive accuracy, zero-shot performance, and domain adaptability through fine-tuning. The analysis used two permafrost feature datasets, ice-wedge polygons and retrogressive thaw slumps because (1) these landform features are more challenging to segment than man-made features due to their complicated formation mechanisms, diverse forms, and vague boundaries; (2) their presence and changes are important indicators for Arctic warming and climate change. The results show that although promising, SAM still has room for improvement to support AI-augmented terrain mapping. The spatial and domain generalizability of this finding is further validated using a more general dataset EuroCrops for agricultural field mapping. Finally, we discuss future research directions that strengthen SAM’s applicability in challenging geospatial domains. 

GeoAI, or geospatial artificial intelligence, has become a trending topic and the frontier for spatial analytics in Geography. Although much progress has been made in exploring the integration of AI and Geography, there is yet no clear definition of GeoAI, its scope of research, or a broad discussion of how it enables new ways of problem solving across social and environmental sciences. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of GeoAI research used in large-scale image analysis, and its methodological foundation, most recent progress in geospatial applications, and comparative advantages over traditional methods. We organize this review of GeoAI research according to different kinds of image or structured data, including satellite and drone images, street views, and geo-scientific data, as well as their applications in a variety of image analysis and machine vision tasks. While different applications tend to use diverse types of data and models, we summarized six major strengths of GeoAI research, including (1) enablement of large-scale analytics; (2) automation; (3) high accuracy; (4) sensitivity in detecting subtle changes; (5) tolerance of noise in data; and (6) rapid technological advancement. As GeoAI remains a rapidly evolving field, we also describe current knowledge gaps and discuss future research directions. 

Replicability takes on special meaning when researching phenomena that are embedded in space and time, including phenomena distributed on the surface and near surface of the Earth. Two principles, spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity, are generally characteristic of such phenomena. Various practices have evolved in dealing with spatial heterogeneity, including the use of place-based models. We review the rapidly emerging applications of artificial intelligence to phenomena distributed in space and time and speculate on how the principle of spatial heterogeneity might be addressed. We introduce a concept of weak replicability and discuss possible approaches to its measurement.