Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Governing the cryosphere beyond political timeframes
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Glaciology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Sustainability
Cryospheric systems are nearing irreversible thresholds, yet political processes remain misaligned with the long timescales of ice loss. Using COP30 as context, we argue that cryosphere science must inform governance capable of linking near-term decisions with long-term stability in a rapidly changing world.
Timescales of Antarctic ice shelf loss via basal crevassing
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Antarctic ice-shelves are vulnerable to collapse in a warming climate. However, when this might happen is largely unknown, propagating significant uncertainty into sea-level-rise projections. To constrain this uncertainty, we use fracture modelling to predict the timescales on which crevasses fully penetrate ice-shelves, and consider how these timescales change under future warming. We find that [...]
Arsenic immobilisation analysis at iron-manganese mineral phases with sustainable bioaugmentation
Published: 2025-11-21
Subjects: Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Microbiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Alternate wetting and drying (AWD) cycles significantly influence arsenic (As) mobility and sequestration in contaminated soils, yet the mechanisms underlying As immobilisation at iron-manganese (Fe-Mn) mineral interfaces remain poorly characterised. This study investigates As entrapment within Fe-Mn mineral layers and evaluates long-term immobilisation stability when bioaugmented with Bacillus [...]
Coral reef commitments are largely absent from national biodiversity and climate frameworks
Published: 2025-11-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Sustainability
Global agreements under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) call for integrated action on biodiversity loss and climate change. Yet national implementation remains poorly understood, even for ecosystems highly vulnerable to warming, such as tropical coral reefs. Bleaching-level heat stress has affected over 85% of global reefs [...]
Technical Brief: Uncovering Sub-Regional Drivers of Deforestation in the Amazon: A Tool for Targeted Solutions
Published: 2025-11-20
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability
This technical brief provides the first region-wide analysis of the commodity-specific agricultural drivers of deforestation across the Amazon region at a sub-national level, offering insights to inform more effective and equitable conservation policy. We achieve this by integrating sub-national agricultural production statistics with satellite data on land use and commodity production for each [...]
Recent climate change reduced Spanish forests' carbon sink capacity
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Forests play a crucial role as carbon sinks and are central to climate mitigation strategies, yet their long-term reliability in this function is increasingly uncertain under climate change. Using deep learning techniques on a multi-source dataset—combining multi-spectral satellite data, airborne laser scanning, and ground-based measurements—we produced the most up-to-date high-resolution maps of [...]
Linking Water Temperature Variability to Water Quality Dynamics in Beck Lake, an Urban Inland Lake in Chicago (2020–2024)
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Abstract This study examines the effect of climate variability on water quality in Beck Lake, an inland urban lake in Chicago, Illinois, from 2020 to 2024. The lake is maintained by the Chicago Park District and contains aquatic life such as Bluegill, Largemouth Bass, and Northern Pike. To determine climate influence, satellite-derived water temperature data were analyzed using time series [...]
Two-thirds of new fossil fuel infrastructure targets critical ecosystems, elevating health risks for millions
Published: 2025-11-12
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
While the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate change is well established, the elevated risks to fenceline communities and critical ecosystems remain underexplored at a global scale, limited to a handful of prior coarse assessments. Here we map over 18,000 operating fossil fuel facilities across 170 countries, and assess their placement in surrounding populations and ecosystems, [...]
The Tocantins Framework: A Machine Learning-Based Assessment of Intra-urban Thermal Anomalies
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Statistics and Probability, Sustainability
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect has been extensively studied at the city scale. Yet, the Intra-Urban Heat Island and the Intra-Urban Cool Island effects remain poorly characterized due to the absence of standardized quantification frameworks. This study introduces the Tocantins Framework, a dual-metric system combining machine learning and spatial morphology to identify and quantify [...]
Extratropical forcing of low-latitude subsurface oxygenation under future warming
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The global ocean is losing oxygen under climate warming, yet most climate models project rising oxygen levels in low-latitude subsurface waters (~100–500 m), partly due to their enhanced ventilation. However, underlying drivers for the enhanced ventilation remain unclear. Here we demonstrate that the enhanced tropical subsurface ventilation is driven by extratropical forcing. While extratropical [...]
Spatiotemporal dynamics of air pollution and vegetation health in a rapidly urbanizing city in northeastern Bangladesh
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Geography
Air pollution poses a significant environmental concern and is recognized as the fourth leading risk factor affecting human health. Understanding the levels of air pollution and its relationships with vegetation is crucial for assessing health risks under rapid urbanization. In this study, using the extracted imagery from the Sentinel-5 and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) [...]
A proof-of-stake blockchain framework for transparent climate data verification
Published: 2025-11-05
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Trust in climate data remains a significant barrier to effective climate action. Skepticism about data manipulation and politicization reduces confidence and hinders evidence-based policy. Existing climate data systems lack transparent verification and accessible analytical tools, limiting accountability and stakeholder engagement. This study presents a reproducible framework that applies [...]
A climate-biodiversity funnel that accelerates action towards global goals
Published: 2025-11-05
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Joint action on climate and biodiversity is urgently needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement (PA) and Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF). Here, we analyse interlinkages between targets in these two landmark international agreements. We find recognition of climate-biodiversity interactions in the agreement texts (three KM-GBF Targets and four PA Articles), [...]
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 [...]
Arctic Plastification: Climate-driven amplification of plastic pollution through accumulation and fragmentation
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Rapid warming of the Arctic, known as Arctic Amplification, is reshaping ice, ocean, and coastal systems in ways that alter how plastic pollution accumulates and transforms in the region. As global plastic emissions continue to rise, more debris is transported northward by rivers and ocean currents. At the same time, the loss of sea ice, coastal erosion, and the formation of new shorelines are [...]