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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment

Machine learning approaches to Landsat change detection analysis

Galen Richardson, Anders Knudby, Morgan A Crowley, et al.

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 [...]

Global deep learning model for delineation of optically shallow and optically deep water in Sentinel-2 imagery

Galen Richardson, Neve Foreman, Anders Knudby, et al.

Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

In aquatic remote sensing, algorithms commonly used to map environmental variables rely on assumptions regarding the optical environment. Specifically, some algorithms assume that the water is optically deep, i.e., that the influence of bottom reflectance on the measured signal is negligible. Other algorithms assume the opposite and are based on an estimation of the bottom-reflected part of the [...]

Ecosystem extent mapping in a global monitoring context

Polina Tregubova, Bruno Smets, Lars Hein, et al.

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

Bryan Fuentes, Patricia Manley, Nicholas Povak

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

Suhani Gupta, Sudhi Vashistha, Shailja Gauniyal, et al.

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

Matthew Terndrup

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

Trevor Mason Ponto

Published: 2025-08-28
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

Mikita Klimenka, Simone Mora, Diaa Addeen Abuhani, et al.

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

Jonathan Gewirtzman, Ashley Keiser, Matthew A Nieland, et al.

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

Rusmawan Suwarman, Rafly Azaria, Sandy Hardian Susanto Herho, et al.

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

isaac gerg, Arik M Tashie, Amiya Patanaik, et al.

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

Sam Zipper, Ian Gambill, Monty Schmitt, et al.

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

Bailey K. Fosdick, Zachary Weller, Hon Xing Wong, et al.

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

Alessio Rovere, Patrick T. Boyden, Andreas Haas, et al.

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

Jan Philipp Kreibich, Will Glamore, Hongxing Zheng, et al.

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 [...]

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