Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Efficacy of Recent Prescribed Burning and Land Management on Wildfire Burn Severity and Smoke Emissions in the Western United States
Published: 2024-12-21
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Prescribed fire is increasingly proposed as a policy strategy to reduce wildfire risks, but evidence of its effectiveness in lowering fire severity and smoke emissions remains limited in the western US. We empirically demonstrate that areas treated with prescribed fire and subsequently burned during California’s extreme 2020 wildfire season showed a -14% net reduction in smoke emissions, though [...]
Global drivers of forest loss at 1 km resolution
Published: 2024-12-20
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Forests are in decline worldwide due to human activities such as agricultural expansion, urbanization, and mineral extraction. Forest loss due to generally temporary causes, such as wildfire and forest management, is important to distinguish from permanent land use conversion due to the differing ecological and climate impacts of these disturbances and for the purposes of developing effective [...]
A Novel Model to Assess the Greenhouse Effect
Published: 2024-12-20
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
The greenhouse effect is the warming of the earth's surface due to the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It is said to be 33 °C, but we cannot measure this value because we cannot create the state “without greenhouse gases”. We therefore have to rely on calculations, although these are controversial. In the climate debate, this lack of measurements is often denoted as a major [...]
Nonlinear carbon feedbacks in CMIP6 and their impacts on future freshwater availability
Published: 2024-12-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Will plants consume more or less water in a high carbon dioxide [CO2] world? What will the hydrologic consequences of those changes will be? Some theories and analyses of earlier generations of Earth System Models (ESM) suggest that transpiration will decline with higher atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations [CO2] due to stomatal closure, thereby enhancing runoff and soil moisture and [...]
Groundwater Flooding of Superficial Gravels in an Urbanized Catchment
Published: 2024-12-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Groundwater behavior in superficial gravel aquifers is globallypoorly understood, especially across urban regions where drinking water is sourced from elsewhere. We focus on one such region around Staines, SE UK, where local River Terrace Gravels form a thin (<10 m) superficial aquifer. Our objective was to explain the unusually broad and long-lived distribution of flooding by investigating [...]
Holocene environmental change in Rotsee, and its impact on sedimentary carbon storage
Published: 2024-12-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
To assess the long-term impact of climate change on mountain lakes and their sedimentary carbon storage, paleo-environmental approaches using well-dated lake sediment cores can be employed. For Rotsee, a perialpine lake near the Swiss Alps, a new sediment core has allowed the reconstruction of carbon mass accumulation rates for organic and inorganic carbon since 13ka BP. A multiproxy approach [...]
A Conversational Intelligent Assistant for Enhanced Operational Support in Floodplain Management with Multimodal Data
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Floodplain management is crucial for mitigating flood risks and enhancing community resilience, yet floodplain managers often face significant challenges, including the complexity of data analysis, regulatory compliance, and effective communication with diverse stakeholders. This study introduces Floodplain Manager AI, an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) based virtual assistant designed to [...]
Impact of farm size on the function of landscape-level payments for ecosystem services: An agent-based model study
Published: 2024-12-18
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Reducing pesticide use and restoring biodiversity are among the most pressing environmental challenges. Enhancing natural pest control ecosystem services through the integration of non-crop habitats (NCH) offers promising potential, creating a positive feedback loop by harnessing insect biodiversity to reduce pesticide reliance. Policy support is needed at the landscape level to encourage [...]
Catastrophe risk models as quantitative tools for climate change loss and damage: A demonstration for flood in Malawi, Vietnam, and the Philippines
Published: 2024-12-18
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
We show how catastrophe models, as commonly used in the insurance and reinsurance industries, can be used to quantify climate change loss(es) and damage(s), fulfilling a key need to make urgent progress in this arena of international climate policy. We explore the impact of climate change on inland flood risk in three Global South regions (Chikwawa in Malawi, Hanoi in Vietnam, and Cagayan in the [...]
Projecting Global Changes in Land Use and Ecosystem Services Using SEALS (Spatial Economic Allocation Landscape Simulator)
Published: 2024-12-18
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Spatial Science, Statistical Models
Understanding how economic systems and ecosystems interact across space is crucial to ensure societal needs are met without compromising environmental quality. Spatially explicit economic models usually describe human activities and ensuing land-use dynamics at a resolution that this is too coarse (typically 10-1000 regions) to understand how these affect many biophysical processes, including [...]
Glacier preservation doubled by limiting warming to 1.5°C
Published: 2024-12-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Glaciers adapt slowly to changing climatic conditions, resulting in long-term changes in their mass with implications for sea level rise and water supply, even if the climate were to stabilize. Using eight glacier evolution models, we simulate global glacier evolution over multi-centennial timescales, allowing glaciers to equilibrate with climate under various constant global temperature [...]
Climate-Induced Sea-Level Rise Implications on Archaeological Taonga at Te Pokohiwi ō Kupe – The Wairau Bar, Aotearoa New Zealand
Published: 2024-12-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The northwest portion of Te Pokohiwi ō Kupe (the Wairau Bar) in the Marlborough Region is where one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s earliest archaeological heritage sites dating back to the early 1300’s is located. This paper describes a baseline study to map the effects of present-day and future sea-levels on archaeological heritage land at Te Pokohiwi ō Kupe. Results suggest that approximately 20% of [...]
Growing wildfire-derived PM2.5 across the contiguous U.S. and implications for air quality regulation
Published: 2024-12-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies
Growing wildfire activity across North America produces significant smoke, undermining efforts to regulate surface air quality and protect public health. Using surface measurements, satellites, and machine learning, we provide granular, daily estimates of smoke PM2.5 concentrations in the contiguous U.S. from 2006 to 2023, and use them to assess the implications of smoke for surface air pollution [...]
Tracking Drought Impacts from Texts: Towards AI-Assisted Drought Impact Detection
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology
Drought is recognized for its extensive and varied impacts. Based on the drought-related textual datasets from the National Drought Mitigation Center, our research applies advanced artificial intelligence techniques, including deep learning and natural language processing, to enhance the monitoring of multifaceted drought impacts in the United States. This study also delves into predicting [...]
A Millimeter-Scale Change in Leaf Litter Placement Within Soil-Water Interfaces Alters Carbon Dioxide and Methane Emission
Published: 2024-12-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Soil Science, Sustainability
Flooded soils play a critical role in global carbon cycling, serving as significant reservoirs of soil organic carbon and sources of carbon emissions. Leaf litter, particularly from local vegetation, is a major contributor to soil organic carbon formation in these ecosystems, with its decomposition driving the production of carbon dioxide and methane. While numerous studies have investigated the [...]