Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Software Engineering
A pipeline for representing buildings as fuels in wildland urban fire spread and risk modeling
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Mechanical Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Mechanical Engineering, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical and Environmental Geography, Risk Analysis, Software Engineering, Spatial Science
Wildfires pose an increasing risk to structures and communities located adjacent to or among vegetative landscapes. Yet most open landscape-scale fire modeling workflows still lack a reproducible way to represent buildings as combustible fuels rather than only as exposed assets or nonburnable developed land. This paper presents FireDX, a geospatial data engine that generates standardized, [...]
SWMMCanada: An Open-Source Service for Generating Ready-to-Run Urban Drainage Models Across Canada
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydrology, Software Engineering
Urban stormwater modelling is often slowed more by data preparation than by the simulation itself, because rainfall, terrain, land cover, soil, and pipe network data usually come from different agencies, formats, projections, and data structures. This software paper presents SWMMCanada, an open source and standardized model building service that makes Canadian urban hydrological modelling easier [...]
Engineering AI-Assisted Client-Side Scientific Workflows: WebGPU Inference Architecture and Framework for Privacy-Preserving Hydrological Analysis
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Software Engineering
Deep learning has demonstrated strong potential for improving hydrological predictions, yet its practical adoption remains limited by software complexity, infrastructure requirements, data governance constraints, and fragmented analytical workflows. This study presents Hydro AI Lab, an AI-assisted client-side scientific workflow platform that enables end-to-end hydrological analysis, including [...]
HydroModelSpec: Toward Standardized Machine Learning Model Exchange in Hydrology
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Software Engineering
The rapid growth of deep learning models for hydrological forecasting (e.g., CNNs, LSTMs, Transformers) has created a fragmented ecosystem where trained models remain tied to their original frameworks, environments, and institutions. Despite substantial investments in model development, the hydrological community lacks a generalized structure for packaging models with their architecture, training [...]
How Do Discrete Global Grid Systems Actually Perform? A Systematic Benchmark Across Geometry, Computation and Relational Joins
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Software Engineering, Spatial Science
As geospatial datasets exceed the billion-row threshold, Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) promise to replace expensive vector spatial joins with fast relational hash-joins on discrete cell identifiers. However, the real-world performance of different grid implementations and the upfront cost of converting vector geometries into grid indexes remains largely unquantified. This paper introduces [...]
Design Rationale of the JcupLT Coupling Library: Lessons Learned from Jcup Development and Applications
Published: 2026-04-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Software Engineering
Coupling libraries are essential infrastructure for multi-component simulations in weather, climate, and earth system modeling. Jcup is a coupling library developed since 2007 and applied to a wide range of coupled simulations, including atmosphere–ocean coupling, land surface modeling, seismic–structural coupling, and AI-integrated simulations. Through nearly two decades of development and [...]
Bridging Natural Language and Desktop GIS Automation with LLM-Powered GIS Plugins
Published: 2026-03-08
Subjects: Other Earth Sciences, Software Engineering
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are indispensable for spatial analysis and remote sensing, but still, scripting interfaces that enable automation (ArcPy, PyQGIS, and SNAP GPT) impose a steep technical barrier on domain scientists who are not software developers. We present GIS~Chat, an open-source suite of three plugins that embed a Large Language Model (LLM) chat panel directly inside [...]
Facilitating AI-Driven Sustainability: A Service-Oriented Ar-chitecture for Interoperable Environmental Data Access
Published: 2026-01-12
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology, Software Engineering, Sustainability
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly agentic AI, have created opportunities to enhance global sustainability by improving the efficiency and accuracy of environmental monitoring and response systems. Agentic AIs autonomously plan and execute towards specific goals with minimal or no human intervention; however, accessing environmental data is challenging and requires expertise, [...]
SpartANN - Spectral Pattern Analysis and Remote-sensing Tool with Artificial Neural Networks
Published: 2025-01-28
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Geography, Remote Sensing, Software Engineering
Remote sensing, particularly from satellite observation, has become the standard tool for monitoring the planet with a steady increase of data production, and has seen wide application in ecosystem services analysis and management. Many remote sensing applications involve image classification, using methods from simple regressions to complex machine learning approaches that require advanced user [...]
An updated version of the SZ-plugin: from space to space-time data-driven modeling in QGIS
Published: 2025-01-14
Subjects: Geology, Geomorphology, Software Engineering, Statistical Models
The geospatial community usually makes use of GIS environments to handle databases and pre-process their information. Actual analyses, especially data-driven ones, are performed outside GIS platforms. This interrupts the flow of information and the processing chain in a number of I/O operations that inevitably slow down the overall analytical protocols. The first version of the SZ-plugin [...]
Integrating Conversational AI Agents for Enhanced Water Quality Analytics: Development of a Novel Data Expert System
Published: 2024-06-01
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil Engineering, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Software Engineering
Despite advancements in environmental monitoring, the gap between data collection and user-friendly data interpretation remains a significant challenge, especially in the domain of water quality management. This paper introduces the Artificial Intelligence Data Expert (AI-DE), a novel data analytics system that is designed to facilitate on-demand analysis of time-series sensor data related to [...]
River Morphology Information System: A Web Cyberinfrastructure for Advancing River Morphology Research
Published: 2024-05-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Databases and Information Systems, Geographic Information Sciences, Software Engineering
The study and management of river systems are increasingly challenged by the complexity and volume of data required to understand and predict river morphology changes. The River Morphology Information System (RIMORPHIS) is introduced as a transformative solution to these challenges, serving as an open-access web-based cyberinfrastructure designed to enable advanced research in river morphology [...]
Open-source approach for reproducible substrate mapping using semantic segmentation on recreation-grade side scan sonar datasets
Published: 2023-12-21
Subjects: Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Programming Languages and Compilers, Software Engineering, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Knowledge of the variation and distribution of substrates at large spatial extents in aquatic systems, particularly rivers, is severely lacking, impeding species conservation and ecosystem restoration efforts. Air and space-borne remote sensing important for terrestrial and atmospheric measurements are limited in benthic environments due to river stage, turbidity, and canopy cover, requiring [...]
EZ-InSAR: An Easy-to-use Open-source Toolbox for Mapping Ground Surface Deformation using Satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar
Published: 2023-01-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Software Engineering
Satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) is a space-borne geodetic technique that can map ground displacement at millimetre accuracy. Via the new era for InSAR applications provided by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR satellites, several open-source software packages exist for processing the SAR data, obtaining high- quality ground deformation maps but still requires a deep [...]
Automated stratigraphic correlation and model building using chronostratigraphic principles
Published: 2022-08-07
Subjects: Sedimentology, Software Engineering, Stratigraphy
Stratigraphic correlation of geophysical well logs is one of the most important - and most time-consuming - tasks that applied geoscientists perform on a daily basis. Using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm, automated correlation of two wells is a fairly simple task; DTW can also be used to correlate a large number of wells along a single path. However, errors accumulate along a path and [...]