Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Rapid Estimation of Soil Profile Arsenic Content and Identification of Substitute Indicators Using Random Forest: A Case Study of Nenjiang City, China
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Direct measurement of soil arsenic (As) requires complex analytical procedures, motivating the development of predictive methods based on readily measurable indicators. This study systematically analyzed 50 geochemical indicators using 204 soil samples collected from 69 sampling sites across a 0–500 cm depth profile in Nenjiang County, Heilongjiang Province. A random forest (RF) algorithm was [...]
A Multi-Pathway Contamination Risk Model for Niger Delta Communities: Integrating Hydrocarbon Load, Heavy Metal Exposure, and Vegetation Stress Indices from Heterogeneous Observational Data
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The Niger Delta is one of the most petroleum-impacted environments in the world, yet spatially explicit contamination risk assessments that integrate multiple exposure pathways remain scarce. This study presents a Composite Risk Score (CRS) model that fuses heavy metal soil and water measurements from nine peer-reviewed studies, total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) data from the 2011 UNEP [...]
Multi-scale measurements and temporally resolved modeling of methane emissions at natural gas distribution stations
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane (CH4) emissions from natural gas distribution stations are not well characterized by measurements, contributing to uncertainty in urban emissions inventories and mitigation strategies. We conducted a multi-scale, multi-temporal study of four distribution stations in Calgary, Alberta, combining component- and facility-level measurements with modeling to quantify, attribute, and compare [...]
Urban Morphology & Climate Hazards: A Systematic Review of Global Evidence, Gaps and Future Directions
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Urban morphology shapes cities’ exposure to climate hazards, yet evidence remains fragmented across across hazard types, urban forms, data sources, analytical approaches, and geographic contexts. This systematic review synthesizes evidence on links between urban morphology and six hazards: urban heat, floods, landslides, air-quality degradation, wildfires, and droughts. We reviewed peer-reviewed [...]
Detecting industrial ammonia and ethylene point sources with the thermal bands of Landsat 8 and 9
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Industrial point sources of ammonia (NH₃) and ethylene (C₂H₄) are poorly constrained in current inventories, in part because satellites tend to offer either fine spatial detail or frequent revisits. We show that the two thermal-infrared bands of the Landsat 8 and 9 Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), though built for land-surface monitoring, can detect and spatially resolve such plumes at 100 m [...]
Quantifying Watershed Criticality via Deep Learning and Explainable AI for Groundwater Resilience
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Groundwater is a vital freshwater resource that supports drinking water supply, agricultural sustainability, ecosystem functioning, and drought resilience. As water scarcity and climate change impacts intensify, sustainable groundwater management plays an important role in groundwater management, with groundwater storage (GWS) acting as a key indicator of groundwater resilience. This study [...]
Increasing lithium mining could threaten endemic species in biodiversity hotspots
Published: 2026-07-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Electric vehicles (EVs) are being rapidly deployed as a technological solution to the climate crisis. However, mineral extraction to supply EV battery production can cause serious environmental damage, threatening ecosystems and biodiversity from local to global scales. Lithium, a key EV battery component, is experiencing an enormous mining boom, which could drive species population declines and [...]
Does Free Allocation Slow Decarbonization ? Installation-Level Evidence from the EU ETS, Phases III and IV
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistics and Probability
Installations at high risk of carbon leakage receive free allowances from the European Union Emissions Trading System. Free allowances are allocated to prevent energy-intensive factories from relocating outside the EU. However, whether free allocation slows decarbonization remains an open question. In this paper, I test this question directly. The panel was built at the installation-level. The [...]
Mapping ethylene plumes using satellite high-resolution imaging spectrometers that exploit the SWIR spectrum
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Ethylene (C2H4) is an important volatile organic compound that has a negative impact on human health, but space-based monitoring of plumes from this gas remains largely unexplored. Here, we demonstrate, for the first time, that ethylene point-source emissions can be detected and quantified using shortwave infrared (SWIR) imaging spectroscopy, overcoming the spatial limitations of existing thermal [...]
Spectrally structured CNN encoding for interpretable and edgeready fractional vegetation cover mapping using UAS multispectral and imaging spectroscopy
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing
Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is a key indicator of semi-arid ecosystem condition, but non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) remains difficult to map because dry or senescent vegetation, litter, woody debris, and standing dead material can overlap spectrally with photosynthetic vegetation (PV) and bare ground (BE), especially where shadows, exposed bare earth surfaces, and mixed vegetation-soil [...]
Coastal plain retention modulates flashflood chlorophylla anomalies in the Red Sea: a CPRI based multisite analysis
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The eastern Red Sea coastal margin is among the most oligotrophic large marine ecosystems on Earth, where episodic nutrient pulses from flash floods can transiently fuel phytoplankton blooms. Yet, the extent to which upstream coastal-plain geomorphology modulates the magnitude of these flood-driven chlorophylla (Chla) responses remains poorly quantified. We tested the hypothesis that narrower [...]
Resolving microscale surface temperature variability during a heatwave using a dense sensor network
Published: 2026-06-29
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
High-resolution observations of near-surface temperature variability are essential for understanding heat exposure during extreme weather events, yet are rarely available from dense, regularly spaced in situ measurement grids, with most existing observations derived from unevenly distributed sensor networks. Here, we analyse temperature measurements derived from a dense network of over 3,000 [...]
Translation and commentary on Carl Eduard Ney’s (1893/1894) Ueber die Messung des an den Schäften der Bäume herabfliessenden Regenwassers
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
Stemflow is now recognized as a hydrologically consequential pathway, yet much of twentieth-century forest hydrology treated it as negligible. This paper revisits a counterpoint, a formal exchange regarding stemflow between Government and Forestry Councilor C.E. Ney and Imperial-Royal Trainee Dr. E. Hoppe at the first Congress of the International Union of Forestry Research Stations (Mariabrunn, [...]
Air quality and health impacts of Data Center electricity demand in the United States
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is associated with a substantial growth in electricity demand from data centers in the US, yet the resulting air quality and public health impacts remain poorly quantified. Data centers represent large, near-continuous demands that fundamentally alter power system dispatch and emissions. To quantify the ambient air pollution and associated premature [...]
Where to Watch the Water: Multi-Sensor Network Design Optimization for Inland Flood Detection
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Inland flood detection is often constrained less by sensor availability than by where sensors are placed along branching river networks, especially in ungauged headwaters where floods often initiate. We present a three-phase, decisionfocused framework for designing basin-by-basin multi-sensor flood detection networks that coordinate water-level, discharge, and camera sensors while explicitly [...]