Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment
Factors Affecting Aboveground Carbon Storage in Mixed Oak-Pine Forests: A Multiple Regression Analysis of Southeastern U.S. Forest Inventory Data
Published: 2025-11-02
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Multivariate Analysis, Natural Resources and Conservation, Plant Sciences, Statistical Models
This study investigated the factors affecting aboveground carbon storage in mixed oak-pine forests of the southeastern United States, with a particular focus on the influence of stand age. Using data from 946 Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plots collected from 2009 to 2019, a multiple regression analysis was conducted to determine the relative importance of various forest and topographic [...]
Emerging Remote Sensing Tools for Comprehensive Cryosphere Assessment
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This review synthesizes current remote sensing (RS) applications for monitoring Earth's cryosphere, encompassing ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice, snow cover, permafrost, and mountain ice features. It examines how satellite-based technologies, including radar interferometry, laser altimetry, passive microwave sensors, and optical imagery, have revolutionized cryospheric science by enabling [...]
Comparative Analysis of GHG Calculation Methodologies in Aviation
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Sustainability, Transportation Engineering
The aviation sector faces mounting pressure to deliver transparent, comparable greenhouse-gas (GHG) disclosures under European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). We provide a comparison of aviation GHG methodologies spanning simple factor tools and flight-specific, lifecycle-inclusive approaches. Our approach combines a structured documentation review (retaining calculators that publish [...]
Complex Realities, Simple Signals? Global Evaluation of Early Warning Signals for Forest Mortality Events
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Sustainability
Forests around the world are increasingly experiencing large-scale regional mortality events as a result of droughts and heat waves. Despite their considerable impacts on the material, non-material, and regulatory contributions of forest ecosystems to people, these mortality events remain difficult to predict. Temporal Early Warning Signals (EWS) based on the concept of Critical Slowing Down [...]
Rethinking livestock futures: Integrating climate impacts and genomic technologies into global food security models
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
With the projected increase in the global population and food demand on a planet in climate crisis, the debate about the role of livestock continues to intensify. Animals farmed for food are both a victim and a contributor of climate change (CC), with animals suffering from heat stress due to CC but also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Livestock studies have demonstrated [...]
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 [...]
Global deep learning model for delineation of optically shallow and optically deep water in Sentinel-2 imagery
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
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 [...]