Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Declining Snowpack in the Presence of Stable Precipitation May Not Negatively Impact Baseflow or Floodplain Vegetation in the Middle Fork Rock Creek Watershed, Montana, USA
Published: 2026-02-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation
In the age of snow droughts and megafires, water availability and changes in precipitation, snowpack, and baseflows are active areas of research. Headwater streams are where all large rivers begin, but their seasonal water availability is difficult to measure because they are so abundant and remote. Remote sensing can help monitor small streams semi-arid areas if there is an appropriate proxy for [...]
A Scalable Borehole Thermometry Framework for Process-Based Monitoring of Near-Surface Thermal Dynamics Across Polar and High-Mountain Cryosphere Systems
Published: 2026-02-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Rapid climate warming is fundamentally altering the thermal structure and stability of glaciers, ice sheets, and ice shelves across polar and high-mountain environments. While satellite remote sensing and surface meteorological networks provide essential observations of atmospheric forcing and surface conditions, the near-surface subsurface layer (approximately 0–3 m depth)—where energy is [...]
Sub-pixel mapping of disturbance and tree mortality dynamics from Sentinel-2 time series around the globe
Published: 2026-02-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Elevated forest disturbances and excess tree mortality are increasingly reported worldwide. Yet existing assessments are either based on patchy terrestrial observations or on large-scale satellite products, which are limited in resolution to pixel-level, binary tree loss detection. This leaves a blind spot on fine-scale disturbances where only a few trees are declining in an otherwise intact [...]
Filling the monitoring gap: Aquatic ecosystem metabolism as a cost-effective, scalable tool for assessing marine carbon dioxide removal
Published: 2026-02-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) is an emerging climate mitigation solution increasingly recognized as necessary to supplement greenhouse gas emission reductions. Various mCDR methods, from biotic to abiotic measures, are being piloted, fueled by enthusiasm from governments and the private sector. As companies start to sell carbon credits, standards for monitoring, reporting, and verification [...]
The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health and Pharmaceuticals
Published: 2026-02-16
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Medical Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Public Health, Sustainability, Toxicology
Climate change and air pollution affect nearly every major organ system, altering both the presentation of disease and patient responses to pharmaceutical treatments. However, existing knowledge on how patients, healthcare professionals, and governments should prepare for these challenges is fragmented. Climate change contributes to premature mortality, increased morbidity, and exacerbation of [...]
Future volcanic eruptions shift the timing of net-zero emissions
Published: 2026-02-15
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Volcanic eruptions are inevitable, unpredictable, and impact climate globally. During outbreaks, volcanic aerosols enter the stratosphere, modifying the planetary energy balance. How eruptions affect biosphere carbon uptake is unclear, as including the possible forcing trajectories in climate model projections is computationally expensive. Here, we show realistic future volcanic forcing increases [...]
Effects of Groundwater Withdrawals for Water Bottling and Municipal Use, Wards Brook Valley, Maine and New Hampshire
Published: 2026-02-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Hydrologic models for the Wards Brook valley near Fryeburg, Maine were developed for historical (2016 – 2021) and hypothetical future conditions (2046 – 2065 and 2080 – 2099) to understand the effects of groundwater withdrawals for bottled water and municipal use on hydrologic conditions (stream base flows and groundwater levels). Analyses showed that the simulated base flows in Wards Brook were [...]
LLM-augmented taxonomy for >4500 palaeopalynology genera
Published: 2026-02-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics
Large Language Models (LLMs), being text-based, are ideal types of artificial intelligence to consider the complexities of palaeontological taxonomy because palaeontology depends on published textual descriptions as the primary, authoritative record of a taxon. This paper describes (1) the preparation of palynological (the study of organic-walled microfossils) taxonomic text contained within the [...]
A Vision for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Great Lakes Research and Management
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Water Resource Management
The Laurentian Great Lakes are a vital freshwater resource and a regionally significant natural system facing complex, persistent, and compounding challenges from climate change, nutrient loading, and invasive species. The increasing availability of observational data, coupled with advances in computational power and machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods, presents an [...]
A metadata schema for documenting material samples from multiple domains
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Library and Information Science
This paper documents a metadata schema, implementation, and associated vocabularies developed for the Internet of Samples (iSamples) project to integrate geoscience, archaeology/anthropology, biology and genomics sample descriptions in a single cross-domain catalog. To develop the sample description scheme for sample discovery across these disparate domains, we reviewed the metadata schema and [...]
Systematic Review of Dissolved Oxygen in Streams and Rivers: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities
Published: 2026-01-28
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Dissolved oxygen (DO) has been extensively studied in streams and rivers. Despite this breadth of research, the processes governing DO are rarely quantified concurrently with whole-ecosystem measurements. To address this gap, we synthesize 230 empirical studies (1964-2024) to evaluate how, where, and with what methods oxygen exchanges—the processes by which oxygen enters and leaves streams—have [...]
Improving 210Po low level measurements in seawater
Published: 2026-01-28
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Ocean is the largest sink of atmospheric carbon, atmospheric CO2 is synthesized by surface phytoplankton into particle organic carbon (POC) that is exported from the ocean surface to depth, where it can be stored for years. An accurate quantification of downward POC flux is crucial for making reliable predictions of present and future atmospheric CO2 concentrations. A method based on the [...]
Smoothing Earth’s surface: the complexity of soil texture class transitions
Published: 2026-01-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Dynamical Systems, Dynamic Systems, Environmental Sciences, Non-linear Dynamics, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Ordinary Differential Equations and Applied Dynamics, Soil Science, Statistical Models, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
Soil depth functions are essential for analysing, modeling, understanding and visualising soil profiles. While robust methods existed for continuous properties, soil texture is typically reported as discrete classes, and no established approach exists to interpolate soil categorical information with depth. Here, we introduced phySplines, a physics-informed, analytically solvable spline for [...]
Spontaneous liquefaction in saturated granular deposits: State controlled boundary and surface reconfiguration
Published: 2026-01-26
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Engineering Science and Materials, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Mechanics of Materials, Mining Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis
In the case of water-saturated, granular deposits that are at risk of liquefaction, engineers need reliable information about the spatial extent of soil deformation in the event of liquefaction. It is not so important for them to know the exact location of the first failure. However, existing anal-yses primarily deal with the triggering of liquefaction and offer only limited information on how [...]
A New Paradigm for High-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal: Intrinsic Radionuclide Properties and Comparative Hazard
Published: 2026-01-21
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology
This paper develops a hazard- and pathway-based framework for high-level radioactive waste (HLW) disposal grounded in intrinsic radionuclide decay characteristics, geochemical behavior, and comparative hazard. We examine the physical and geochemical properties of key radionuclides and quantify lifetime cancer risk from chronic ingestion on a per-unit-mass basis using established regulatory [...]