Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Fernandes and Roberts (2020) - preprint
Published: 2020-08-16
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Paleobiology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Tectonics and Structure
There are many geoscience problems for which constraining histories of uplift or subsidence of Earth’s surface is of direct or indirect importance, for example reconstructing tectonics, mantle convection, geomorphology, sedimentary and chemical flux, biodiversity, glacio-eustasy and climate change. The least equivocal constraints on timing and amplitude of vertical motions on geological [...]
A Comprehensive Flood Event Specification and Inventory: 1930-2020 Turkey Case Study
Published: 2020-08-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Flooding is one of the most frequent natural disasters that have significant impact on communities in terms of loss of life, direct and indirect economic losses, and disruption of daily life. Decision makers often consult flood data inventories to make more informed decisions on the development of flood mitigation plans to protect flood prone communities. A comprehensive inventory that covers [...]
Bridging the gap between geophysics and geology with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)
Published: 2020-08-16
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Natural Resource Economics, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Inverse mapping from geophysics to geology is a difficult problem due to the inherent uncertainty of geophysical data and the spatially heterogeneous patterns (structure) in geology. We describe GANSim, a type of generative adversarial networks (GANs) that discovers the mapping between remotely-sensed geophysical information and geology with realistic patterns, with a specially designed loss [...]
GeospatialVR: A Web-based Virtual Reality Framework for Collaborative Environmental Simulations
Published: 2020-08-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This research introduces GeospatialVR, an open-source collaborative virtual reality framework to dynamically create 3D real-world environments that can be served on any web platform and accessed via desktop and mobile devices and virtual reality headsets. The framework can generate realistic simulations of desired locations entailing the terrain, elevation model, infrastructures, dynamic [...]
Serious Gaming for Water Resources Planning and Hazard Mitigation
Published: 2020-08-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Hydrological hazards lead to a broad range of socio-economic and environmental risks. The development of a resilient community and risk reduction heavily rely on the adoption of holistic watershed master planning whereby the adaptation options consider the risk associated with individual or multiple hydrological hazards occurring simultaneously at a specific location. Such planning approaches [...]
Crop residues are a key feedstock to bioeconomy but available methods for their estimation are highly uncertain
Published: 2020-07-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Crop residues are acknowledged as a key biomass resource to feed tomorrow’s sustainable bioeconomy. Yet, the quantification of these residues at large geographical scales is primarily reliant upon generic statistical estimations based on empirical functions linking the residues production to the primary crop yield. These useful yet unquestioned functions are developed either using direct evidence [...]
Framework for consequential life cycle assessment of pyrolysis biorefineries: A case study for the conversion of primary forestry residues
Published: 2020-07-26
Subjects: Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
The development of bioeconomy needs to accelerate in order to get rid of fossil fuels and products. The production of bio-based products and renewable energy sources from the thermochemical conversion of biomass can be a sustainable alternative. Pyrolysis is one of the thermochemical processes that can convert biomass into liquid (bio-oil), solid (biochar) and gaseous (non-condensable gases) [...]
Overview of recent land cover changes in the biodiversity hotspots
Published: 2020-07-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Biodiversity hotspots are the most biologically rich, yet threatened, terrestrial regions. From 1992 to 2015, they underwent 148 Mha of land cover changes, including forest losses (56 Mha, of which 40 Mha caused by agricultural expansion), declines of shrubland or savannah (23 Mha), and urbanization (10 Mha). The three largest losses in forest areas occurred in Sundaland, Indo-Burma, and [...]
Visualizing the daily evolution and extent of snow drought
Published: 2020-07-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Snow droughts are commonly defined as below average snowpack at a point in time, typically 1 April in the western United States. This definition is valuable for interpreting the state of the snowpack for resource management but obscures the temporal evolution of snow drought. Borrowing from dynamical systems theory, we applied phase diagrams to visually examine the evolution of snowpack [...]
Contributions of paleoecology to Easter Island’s prehistory: a thorough review
Published: 2020-07-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Sustainability
Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is well known for the enigmas surrounding its unique megalithic statues, the moai, and the prehistoric (i.e., pre-European contact) Rapanui society that built them. These enigmas include, among others, the time of the island’s settlement, the geographical origin of the first settlers, the technology associated with moai transportation and emplacement, the occurrence (or [...]
How Extreme Weather Events Are Attributed to Anthropogenic Global Warming
Published: 2020-07-19
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Many politicians and media personalities continue to cast doubt on the idea that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) – the primary driver of current global climate change – could possibly be behind the growing frequency and severity of extreme weather events – the droughts, heatwaves, flooding, etc. that are every year breaking 100 year or greater historical records. This takes the form not just [...]
Adopting deep learning methods for airborne RGB fluvial scene classification.
Published: 2020-07-18
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
River environments are among the world’s most threatened ecosystems. Enabled by the rapid development of drone technology, hyperspatial resolution (<10 cm) images of fluvial scenes are now a common data source used to better understand these sensitive habitats. However, the task of image classification remains challenging for this type of imagery and the application of traditional [...]
Sedimentary structures discriminations with hyperspectral imaging on sediment cores
Published: 2020-07-17
Subjects: Analytical Chemistry, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Multivariate Analysis, Optics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Sedimentology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is a non-destructive high-resolution sensor, which is currently under significant development to analyze geological areas with remote devices or natural samples in a laboratory. In both cases, the hyperspectral image provides several sedimentary structures that need to be separated to temporally and spatially describe the sample. Sediment sequences are composed of [...]
Post-Processing a Conceptual Rainfall-Runoff Model with an LSTM
Published: 2020-07-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Machine learning is becoming an increasingly important part of streamflow forecasting, but as these models to date lack a physical basis, there is a potential that they may produce values that are not realistic. We tested a simple post-processing strategy that uses the outputs from a calibrated conceptual model (the Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting Model with Snow-17; SAC-SMA) as inputs into a [...]
Range-based intensity normalization of ALS data over forested areas using a sensor tracking method from multiple returns
Published: 2020-07-10
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Airborne laser scanning (ALS) point-clouds are used in forest inventory to map properties of the resource. In most cases, only the (x,y,z) coordinates of the point cloud are used to build predictive models of forest structure. Despite being recorded and provided by data suppliers, the intensity values associated with each point are rarely used as an input to such models because raw intensity [...]