Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Unequal scaling of urban vegetation cooling across sociodemographic groups
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Urban vegetation cools cities, but its benefits often reach disadvantaged residents least, a growing concern as urban heat risks intensify. Whether residence-based cooling exposure and its inequality scale systematically with population size and density, as infrastructural and socioeconomic attributes do, remains unclear. Here, we simulate vegetation cooling across Switzerland using process-based [...]
Competing Health Impacts of Smoke from Wildfires, Agricultural Burning, and Prescribed Fires in California
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences
Wildfire smoke is a dominant threat to air quality and public health in North America, but smoke from other fire sources can also affect health during wildfire seasons. In California, smoke from agricultural burning and prescribed fire co-occurs with wildfire smoke, yet the competing health impacts of these sources remain poorly quantified. To investigate these differential impacts, we estimate [...]
Lead contamination in cassava-based food and tubers (Manihot esculenta Crantz) in French Guiana: evidence for soil-to-plant transfer as the primary source
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
This study investigates lead (Pb) contamination in cassava in French Guiana, focusing on its sources, accumulation processes, and. Previous studies in the area have shown that cassava-based products could be a source of lead in diets, raising concern about human exposure. The results show that cassava tubers often contain lead concentrations and 72% of the analysed samples (n=81) exceed [...]
A community data commons for equitable Earth Science
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Earth observation data are abundant but rarely analysis-ready, and the burden of preparation limits who can participate in science. For the last six years, the Google Earth Engine Community Catalog has closed that gap via community-curated, cloud-hosted, FAIR datasets built without formal funding, advancing discovery and equity worldwide.
Leveraging satellite embeddings and national expert annotations for country-level forest land use mapping
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Spatially explicit information on forest as a land use can support climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation actions, as well as supply-chain regulations, but many countries lack recent forest maps consistent with international definitions. Here, we assess a simple and accessible workflow for country-level Forest/Non-Forest mapping using expert reference labels from the FAO Forest [...]
Thermal Dynamics of Peri-Urban Landscapes: A Paired Spatial Analysis of Brick Kilns and Bare Soil in León, Guanajuato
Published: 2026-07-19
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Urban expansion and industrial activities in peri-urban environments modify land cover and influence surface thermal patterns. This study examines the thermal behavior of artisanal brick kilns in León, Guanajuato, Mexico, using a paired spatial approach designed to distinguish the contribution of kiln activity from that of the surrounding landscape. Landsat 8 Collection 2 Level-2 imagery acquired [...]
Validation of Baer-Babinet's Law using modern Landsat retrievals
Published: 2026-07-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In this study, I use a modern river erosion dataset created by Langhorst and Pavelsky (LP) in 2023 (LP 2023) to validate the long-standing contention behind Baer-Babinet's Law (BBL). This law postulates that rivers preferentially erode the right bank of rivers in the Northern Hemisphere and the left bank in the Southern Hemisphere, as a result of the Coriolis Force. Albert Einstein also published [...]
Beyond a Single Risk Score: Posterior Rank Uncertainty in Wildfire Exposure of Transmission Corridors
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Risk Analysis
Transmission-line wildfire risk management frequently demands segment-level priority triage, whereas records regarding equipment status, power outages and routine inspections remain non-public. This study establishes a reproducible framework relying solely on publicly accessible datasets to conduct retrospective external wildfire exposure ranking for transmission line segments across California. [...]
Surface, not exhaust: a multi-sensor satellite test bounds the local thermal footprint of hyperscale data centres
Published: 2026-07-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Whether hyperscale data centres (DCs) warm their surroundings has become a live policy question with directly conflicting answers: a coarse-resolution satellite preprint attributes ~2 °C of land-surface warming to facilities worldwide (Marinoni et al 2026), while peer-reviewed mobile transects near Phoenix measure +0.7-0.9 °C of near-ground air warming within a few hundred metres downwind (Sailor [...]
Rapid Estimation of Soil Profile Arsenic Content and Identification of Substitute Indicators Using Random Forest: A Case Study of Nenjiang City, China
Published: 2026-07-04
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 [...]