Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Other Environmental Sciences
Hazomes: Earth’s natural multi-hazard terrestrial disturbance regimes
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Climate, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Planetary Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ecosystems and societies have evolved together and are shaped by local natural hazard regimes. We introduce hazomes, an Earth classification based on multi‑hazard disturbance patterns. By combining open‑source intensity and return period data for eight hazard types, we identify thousands of distinct terrestrial disturbance regimes. Hazomes aims to deepen insight into ecosystem and societal [...]
fasterRaster: GIS in R using GRASS for large rasters and vectors
Published: 2025-10-17
Subjects: Geomorphology, Hydrology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences
Within the R ecosystem, packages like terra and sf are the go-to solutions for most geospatial analyses, yet can struggle with large rasters and vectors. The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, or GRASS, offers solutions that are often more efficient for large data. However, using GRASS through R requires users to become familiar with GRASS-specific syntax and data constructs. The [...]
Machine learning approaches to Landsat change detection analysis
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
The Landsat mission has captured images of the Earth’s surface for over 50 years, and the data have enabled researchers to investigate a vast array of different change phenomena using machine learning models. Landsat-based monitoring research has been influential in geography, forestry, hydrology, ecology, agriculture, geology, and public health. When monitoring Earth's surface change using [...]
DOZER: a toy model of coastal hazard mitigation during a storm
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Dynamical Systems, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Science and Mathematics Education, Sustainability
Motivated by observations of emergency road-maintenance crews in coastal settings, DOZER is a video game in which the player uses a bulldozer to clear sand from a beachfront road during a storm. DOZER is also a toy model in a formal sense: a heuristic tool for insight into the dynamics of real-time intervention in the physical processes of a natural hazard. Here, I introduce DOZER as both a game [...]
An Ice Core Snapshot of Past Atmospheric Chemistry in Mt. Everest’s 'Death Zone'
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Glaciology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present a unique atmospheric chemistry record from the highest ice core ever recovered (8020 m, South Col Glacier (SCG), Mt. Everest), that captures ~400 years of deposition during the latter half of the first millennium BCE. Due to recent glacier thinning, the upper ~2000 years of accumulation have been lost, however, this is the only ice core record ever recovered from the “Death Zone [...]
Exploration of Gold, Copper, Magnetite, Hematite, Manganese, Magnesium, Chromite, Antimony, Bauxite, Industrial soils, Nickel, Cobalt, Lead, Lithium minerals using Landsat8 satellite
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Environmental Education, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Geophysics and Seismology, Mineral Physics, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences
In this study, we provided an accurate and complete method for exploration and analysis of Gold, Copper, Magnetite, Hematite, Manganese, Magnesium, Chromite, Antimony, Bauxite, Industrial soils, Nickel, Cobalt, Lead and Lithium minerals in the desired area. Mineral exploration can be done using the seven bands from Landsat8 satellite images, through combination of different maps, a specific color [...]
Conservation is Coherence: Introducing the Negawatt Philosophy of Lawful Design
Published: 2025-07-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Other Planetary Sciences, Sustainability, Systems Biology
This paper articulates the Negawatt Philosophy, reframing conservation not as omission or moral restraint, but as the structural intelligence that sustains life and preserves biospheric coherence. Modern economies valorise extraction and combustion while treating conservation as invisible absence. Yet thermodynamics reveals life as negentropy—an ordering that defies the drift into entropy’s [...]
A Review of Atmospheric Micro/Nanoplastics: Insights into Source and Fate for Modelling Studies
Published: 2025-05-09
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences
Micro/nanoplastics (MNPs), as emerging pollutants, have attracted increasing attention due to their potential adverse effects on human health, ecosystems, and climate. The rapid, turbulent, and large-scale nature of atmospheric transport facilitates both horizontal and vertical movement of MNPs over long distances within a short time, largely independent of topographical constraints, thereby [...]
From natural variability to flow homogenisation: how dams, water diversions, and climate change reduced seasonal flows in Australia’s Murrumbidgee River
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
River regulation and climate change have profoundly altered seasonal flow dynamics globally, with cascading ecological impacts on freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity. Magnitude and timing are key components of the flow regime, connecting rivers with floodplains and driving feeding and breeding cues for aquatic organisms. We investigated the separate and combined effects of water resource [...]
Flood type drives river-scale plastic deposition
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Water Resource Management
Plastic pollution is considered a global environmental challenge, prompting international regulation efforts such as the UN plastic treaty to end plastic pollution. River basins, with high population densities and poor waste management, are particularly exposed to plastic pollution. Floods amplify plastic presence in rivers by mobilizing previously deposited and introduce new plastics. Yet, the [...]
2027: Waking the AKU-- A Cosmic Hyperobject View of the Ancient Giant Palm Forest on Rapa Nui
Published: 2025-01-06
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Other Astrophysics and Astronomy, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences, The Sun and the Solar System
Can a repeating climate event be termed as a cosmic hyperobject? Even if it is dynamically changing within hundreds of thousands of years? At the center of this paper is the science: observable data, 15,000 years of climate change on Rapa Nui. Reaching into the past however we begin with a much broader mathematical view from the eyes of Milankovitch theories of the cosmos that stretches a million [...]
Beyond land surface temperature: identifying areas of daytime thermal discomfort in cities by combining remote sensing and field measurements.
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Satellite images of land surface temperatures (LST) are commonly used to identify areas within cities most prone to diurnal thermal discomfort, but they may not reflect the experiences of pedestrians. Here, we developed predictive statistical models for Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET), an indicator of thermal discomfort, with easily accessible spatial predictors. For this, we measured [...]
Land conversions not climate effects are the dominant consequence of sun-driven CO2 capture, conversion, and sequestration
Published: 2024-10-29
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences
Removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere is required for mitigating climate change. Large-scale direct air capture combined with injecting CO2 into geological formations could retain carbon long-term, but demands a substantial amount of energy, pipeline infrastructure, and suitable sites for gaseous storage. Here, we study Earth system impacts of modular, sun-powered process chains, [...]
Designing a scenario of unilateral climate intervention
Published: 2024-09-11
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Studies, International and Area Studies, Other Environmental Sciences
Climate change is causing increasingly alarming global impacts, such as rising temperatures and more severe storms. Despite this, current multilateral initiatives and agreements to systematically reduce greenhouse gas emissions are completely incommensurate with the scale of the problem. Thus, we explore the potential that some unilateral actor, finding present and near-future climate changes [...]
The extended Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset: Extending the GLCP to include ice, snow, and radiation-related climate variables
Published: 2024-08-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
A changing climate and increasing human population necessitate understanding global freshwater availability. To enable assessment of lake water variability from local-to-global and monthly-to-decadal scales, we extended the Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset, which contains monthly lake surface area for 1.42 million lakes with paired basin-level climate and population data [...]