Is there a way to combine multiple tiny polygons into bigger ones and thus making it more likely that the simplify() function will have a meaningful effect? To achieve this, I already tried to use the explode() function, which gives me a DataFrames of Polygons instead of a few MultiPolygon and then apply unary_union(). Sadly, this gives me roughly the same result as the original data. That leads me to the assumption that the polygons might be in such a fragmented state that does not allow for any combination of those, since they share not common edges.