Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment
Towards a global interpretation of dual nitrate isotopes in natural water
Published: 2018-05-23
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Modern anthropogenic activities have significantly increased nitrate (NO3-) concentrations in surface waters. Stable isotopes (δ15N and δ18O) in NO3- offer a tool to deconvolute some of the human-made changes in the nitrogen cycle. They are often graphically illustrated on a template designed to identify different sources of NO3- and denitrification. In the two decades since this template was [...]
Surface albedo as a proxy for land-cover clearing in seasonally dry forests: evidence from the Brazilian Caatinga
Published: 2018-05-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ongoing increase in human and climate pressures, in addition to the lack of monitoring initiatives, makes the Caatinga one of the most vulnerable forests in the world. The Caatinga is located in the semi-arid region of Brazil and its vegetation phenology is highly dependent on precipitation, which has a high spatial and temporal variability. Under these circumstances, satellite image-based [...]
Missing emissions from post-monsoon agricultural fires in northwestern India: regional limitations of MODIS burned area and active fire products
Published: 2018-03-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A rising source of outdoor emissions in northwestern India is crop residue burning, occurring after the monsoon (kharif) and winter (rabi) crop harvests. In particular, post-monsoon rice residue burning, which occurs annually from October to November and is linked to increasing mechanization, coincides with meteorological conditions that enhance short-term air quality degradation. Here we examine [...]
What caused Earths largest mass extinction event? New evidence from the Permian-Triassic boundary in northeastern Utah
Published: 2018-02-26
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
The discovery of a Permian-Triassic boundary section in northeastern Utah reveals a detailed record of events that led to one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet. From 83% to 97% of the species living on the planet went extinct during this relatively short interval of geological time, which defines the major geological boundary between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic Eras. The cause and [...]
Global inventory of landscape patterns and latent variables of landscape spatial configuration
Published: 2018-02-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
We present a regionalization of the entire Earth’s landmass into land units of homogeneous landscape patterns. The input to the regionalization is a high resolution Global Land Cover (GLC) dataset. The GLC is first divided into local landscapes – small non-overlapping square blocks of GLC cells. These blocks are agglomerated into much larger land units using a pattern-based segmentation [...]
Impacts of land-use and land-cover change on stream hydrochemistry in the Cerrado and Amazon biomes
Published: 2018-01-28
Subjects: Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Geography, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Soil Science
Studies on the impacts of land-use and land-cover change on stream hydrochemistry in active deforestation zones of the Amazon agricultural frontier are limited and have often used low-temporal-resolution datasets. Moreover, these impacts are not concurrently assessed in well-established agricultural areas and new deforestations hotspots. We aimed to identify these impacts using an experimental [...]
Basis functions for the consistent and accurate representation of surface mass loading
Published: 2017-11-14
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Inversion of geodetic site displacement data to infer surface mass loads has previously been demonstrated using a spherical harmonic representation of the load. This method suffers from the continent-rich, ocean-poor distribution of the geodetic data, coupled with the predominance of the continental load (water storage and atmospheric pressure) compared with the ocean bottom pressure (including [...]