Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Evidence of rising groundwater and potential for sustainable management amid multi-year droughts in the pastoral regions of northern Kenya
Published: 2026-08-07
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Groundwater underpins water security in the drylands of East Africa, where climate extremes and increasing groundwater use pose growing water management challenges. This study examines groundwater dynamics in arid northern Kenya using multi-source data that combine in-situ electronic sensor measurements with satellite-based rainfall observations, terrestrial water storage anomalies, and model [...]
Mapping Urban Heat Vulnerability in London: Multi-Scale Geospatial Analysis Using Machine Learning, SHAP Explainability, and Temporal Mortality Data
Published: 2026-08-06
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Urban heat is a significant cause of mortality. In London, during the summer of 2022, the United Kingdom experienced its first recorded 40°C day, resulting in excess mortality levels not observed since pre-antibiotic influenza seasons. On 19 July 2022, London reached a temperature of 40.3°C, the highest recorded in the United Kingdom, which corresponded to 18,435 excess deaths in England and [...]
Moving fast without breaking things: The benefits of preprinting for CDR research
Published: 2026-08-06
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences
Advocates of preprinting usually focus on its benefits to individual researchers — more feedback, citations, and visibility. We argue its greater value is collective: preprinting improves scientific coordination, which the carbon dioxide removal field needs in order to move fast without sacrificing rigor.
The Unfinished Map: Observing the Indian Ocean through Model-Corrected, Fleet-Based Sensing
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography
We make decisions about the ocean-the largest and most consequential system on Earth-from a sample so sparse it would be judged inadmissible in almost any other science. Less than one-thousandth of one percent of the deep seafloor has ever been seen by a human eye or camera; most deep-ocean observation has been carried out by a handful of wealthy nations; and the Indian Ocean-which has absorbed a [...]
Quantifying causal effects of green–blue–gray landscape change on urban thermal outcomes: A spatiotemporal causal machine learning analysis across city scales
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Optimizing urban green–blue–gray (UGBG) landscapes has become increasingly important for mitigating surface urban heat island (SUHI) intensity under rapid urbanization. However, the causal effects of landscape pattern changes on SUHI remain poorly quantified, particularly regarding their heterogeneity among spatial configuration, urban scales, and temporal periods. This knowledge gap limits the [...]
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: 2026-07-20
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 [...]