Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
2027: Waking the AKU-- A Cosmic Hyperobject View of the Ancient Giant Palm Forest on Rapa Nui
Published: 2025-01-06
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Other Astrophysics and Astronomy, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences, The Sun and the Solar System
Can a repeating climate event be termed as a cosmic hyperobject? Even if it is dynamically changing within hundreds of thousands of years? At the center of this paper is the science: observable data, 15,000 years of climate change on Rapa Nui. Reaching into the past however we begin with a much broader mathematical view from the eyes of Milankovitch theories of the cosmos that stretches a million [...]
Sea level rise submergence simulations suggest substantial deterioration of Indian River Lagoon ecosystem services by 2050, Florida, U.S.A.
Published: 2025-01-02
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The Indian River Lagoon is a 250-km long Estuary of National Significance located along the east central Florida coast of the USA. NOAA tidal records generated at a station located in the central reaches of the estuary indicate sea level rise has accelerated over the past 20 years to an average of 9.6 ± 1.6 mm yr−1 (2003–2022) and it is expected to continue accelerating over the duration of this [...]
Chromium Isotopes: A Window into Atmospheric Oxygenation
Published: 2024-12-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Chromium (Cr) isotopes are pivotal proxies for understanding Earth’s atmospheric oxygenation history. This review highlights δ53Cr signatures as tools for reconstructing redox dynamics during events like the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) and the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event (NOE). Advances in analytical techniques, particularly multi-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry [...]
Site Planning for a Network of Government-operated Weather Stations in the Dominican Republic Using Zonal Statistics from Geospatial Sources, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making, and Neighborhood Analysis
Published: 2024-12-30
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Many weather station networks lack sufficient representativeness, and their station density is often inadequate to capture spatial and climatic variability effectively. Optimal site selection is therefore essential to enhance spatial coverage and improve data quality. This study proposes a methodology for identifying optimal sites for a meteorological station network in the Dominican Republic, [...]
Efficacy of Recent Prescribed Burning and Land Management on Wildfire Burn Severity and Smoke Emissions in the Western United States
Published: 2024-12-20
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: 2024-12-19
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 [...]