Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment
Ecosystem extent mapping in a global monitoring context
Published: 2025-10-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
The vital role of ecosystems in maintaining biosphere stability is now recognised globally. Updates in policy frameworks on biodiversity and environmental decline include information on ecosystem extent (EE) as a core assessment indicator, e.g., the Global Biodiversity Framework indicator A2 ‘Extent of natural ecosystems’. The recently proposed System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – [...]
Support for Forest Conservation Imperatives: A Robust Approach for Multi-dimensional, Spatially Explicit Resilience Assessment
Published: 2025-09-18
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Forest ecosystems are ecologically, socially, and culturally valuable, and are arguably considered essential to global sustainability. Climate change and altered disturbance regimes are threatening the future of forests around the globe. Many countries are coming together to support and implement conservation and monitoring initiatives to improve future prospects for the restoration and [...]
A Quantitative Analysis of Light Pollution in Gurgaon and a Deepened Understanding of its Impacts
Published: 2025-09-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Light pollution is an emerging environmental and health challenge in rapidly urbanizing Indian cities. This study quantifies night-sky brightness across Gurgaon using a low-cost, Arduino-based Sky Quality Meter (SQM) and integrates these measurements with perception surveys from 91 residents. A total of 62 ground-based data points were collected, revealing distinct spatial variations: highly [...]
Using X-ray Fluorescence to Detect Automobile Heavy Metal Pollution in Los Angeles Soils with Copper and Palladium as Indicators
Published: 2025-08-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This project evaluates the effectiveness of using portable X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) to detect soil composition matrices that show patterns of anthropogenic influence. We explore 26 areas within Los Angeles County, California, that have various amounts of traffic; classifying each locale as Urban or Recreational. The main elements of interest are copper and palladium. These indicators are largely [...]
Hydrology-Based Coastal Risk Assessment in Charleston, South Carolina: Sea-Level Rise, Land Subsidence, Nuisance Flooding, and the Overlooked Role of Groundwater Attenuation
Published: 2025-08-29
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Charleston, South Carolina is among the most flood-exposed cities on the United States Atlantic coast. Tide-gauge records show mean sea level rising at 3.51 mm per year since 1921, while InSAR analyses identify localized subsidence exceeding 4 mm per year, producing effective relative rise of 7 to 8 mm per year. This acceleration explains the increase in nuisance flooding from fewer than 5 days [...]
Cooling Performance: Exploring the Heat Mitigation Effect of Urban Trees with Computer Vision
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Other Computer Sciences
Rising summer temperatures are placing increasing pressure on many cities to adapt public spaces for heightened heat stress. While the cooling benefits of urban trees are well documented, there remains a limited understanding of how these effects vary across tree types, morphologies, and urban contexts. This study addresses this knowledge gap by employing computer vision techniques to analyze [...]
Low-cost autonomous chambers enable high spatial and temporal resolution monitoring of soil CO₂ exchange across landscapes
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Meteorology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Soil Science, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Soil CO₂ flux is a critical component of ecosystem carbon cycling, but due to high cost and mechanistic constraints, existing measurement systems are often limited by trade-offs between resolution (temporal and spatial), and spatial coverage. These constraints hinder efforts to monitor soil fluxes across diverse, heterogeneous landscapes and environmental gradients. 2. We developed Fluxbot [...]
Consecutive Dry Days as a Scale-Dependent Predictor of Tropical Peatland Fire Occurrence in Indonesia
Published: 2025-08-12
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Meteorology
Tropical peatland fires in Indonesia generate severe environmental, health, and economic impacts, yet current fire prediction systems exhibit scale-dependent limitations. This study investigates the relationship between Consecutive Dry Days (CDD) indices and fire occurrence across multiple spatial scales in South Sumatra and West Kalimantan provinces (2015-2019). Using hierarchical buffer [...]
The Indispensable Role of Weather Data in Consumer Spending Prediction: A Robust Machine Learning Assessment
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology
Accurate forecasting of daily consumer spending is crucial for strategic decision-making in the retail sector, yet the dynamic influence of weather is often underestimated or insufficiently integrated into predictive models. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of incorporating both historical and 7-day weather forecast data on predicting consumer spending amounts across three diverse [...]
Lagged impacts of groundwater pumping on streamflow due to stream drying: Incorporation into analytical streamflow depletion estimation methods
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water management often requires accounting for reductions in streamflow caused by groundwater pumping (‘streamflow depletion’). Since streamflow depletion cannot be quantified from observational data, it is typically modeled. Analytical depletion functions (ADFs) are a low-cost, low-complexity approach for estimating streamflow depletion with utility for decision support, but ADFs adopt several [...]
Extrapolation Approaches for Creating Comprehensive Measurement-Based Methane Emissions Inventories
Published: 2025-06-07
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Measurement-based methane emissions inventories are essential for U.S. oil and natural gas operators to track their progress toward emissions targets, demonstrate the impact of improved operational and monitoring practices, and enable the scientific community to monitor methane budgets at various scales. However, translating raw emission measurement data, whether from continuous monitoring [...]
Unprecedented decline in modern coral reef communities could indicate the onset of the Anthropocene
Published: 2025-06-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Stratigraphy
Coral reefs have experienced widespread and accelerated decline, driven by a combination of global and local anthropogenic stressors. To contextualize these changes, we compared the composition of coral reef communities on Curaçao between 1973 and 2023 with that of corals preserved in fossil reefs from the Last Interglacial period (128–116 ka). These fossil reefs, exposed along the island’s [...]
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 [...]
Spatio-economic valuation of sand in the context of shoreline (in)stability in the Senegal estuary (West Africa), integrating DeltaDTM and LiDAR technology
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Natural Resource Economics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Statistics and Probability
Coastal erosion is an increasing challenge in coastal management, resulting from complex interactions between geomorphological features, marine forcing, and anthropogenic interventions. The growing influence of human development and intervention on estuaries and coastal area evolution has led to a global sediment crisis, particularly in tropical or low-lying deltas (for example, Niger, Senegal, [...]
A realistic climate strategy
Published: 2025-04-12
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
The international climate strategy is failing. Current policies will act too slowly to prevent rising temperatures from crossing critical climate tipping points. IPCC assessments underestimate the non-linear risks and catastrophic costs of overshooting Paris Agreement targets. Opponents of solar geoengineering cite concerns about moral hazard and other potential risks; however, at this juncture [...]