Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Success at the farm-level in payments for ecosystem services: monetary incentives, participatory processes and institutional adaptation all matter
Published: 2020-04-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
While payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes are increasingly common, in most cases, their effectiveness has lagged behind initial expectations. A major debate exists around whether performance can be improved by prioritising project design features that align with the theoretical, economistic model of PES, or whether, where necessary, it is more important for projects to depart from this [...]
Social as much as environmental: the drivers of tree biomass in smallholder forest landscape restoration programmes
Published: 2020-04-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A major challenge for forest landscape restoration initiatives is the lack of quantitative evidence on how social factors drive environmental outcomes. Here we conduct a transdisciplinary quantitative analysis of the environmental and social drivers of tree biomass accumulation across 639 smallholder farms restoring native tree species in Mexico, Uganda and Mozambique. We use environmental and [...]
Cascading Failure Phenomenon in the Multi-Stage Hydraulically Fractured Wells
Published: 2020-04-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The phenomenon of cascading fracture failure during flowback and initial production from a horizontal multistage hydraulically fractured well is introduced, described, and investigated. First, a simplified analytical model of production from such well is built. This model allows evaluating a range of systems parameters through which the cascading failure evolves and performing a sensitivity study [...]
Weak influence of paleoenvironmental conditions on the subsurface biosphere of lake Ohrid in the last 515 ka
Published: 2020-04-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Other Earth Sciences, Paleobiology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding the response of geo- and biosystems to past climatic disturbance is primordial to assess the short to long terms effects of current global change. Lacustrine sediments are commonly used to investigate the impact of climatic change on biogeochemical cycling. In these sediments, subsurface microbial communities play a primordial role in nutrient, organic matter and elemental cycling, [...]
Global heat uptake by inland waters
Published: 2020-04-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Heat uptake is a key variable for understanding the Earth system response to greenhouse gas forcing. Despite the importance of this heat budget, heat uptake by inland waters has so far not been quanti?ed. Here we use a unique combination of global-scale lake models, global hydrological models and Earth system models to quantify global heat up take by natural lakes, reservoirs and rivers. The [...]
InSAR Time Series Analysis of L-band Wide- Swath SAR Data Acquired by ALOS-2
Published: 2020-04-12
Subjects: Aerospace Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Hydrology, Mining Engineering, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology
Operating at L-band (~24 cm wavelength) in wide-swath modes is one of the characteristics of the new and next generation satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) missions. After 3 years of operation, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) satellite has acquired a wealth of L-band wide-swath SAR data over many areas using its ScanSAR mode. We present [...]
Estimating Azimuth Offset With Double-Difference Interferometric Phase: The Effect of Azimuth FM Rate Error in Focusing
Published: 2020-04-06
Subjects: Aerospace Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Hydrology, Mining Engineering, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology
Estimating azimuth offset with double-difference interferometric (DDI) phase, which is called multiple-aperture interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) or spectral diversity, is increasingly used in recent years to measure azimuth deformation or to accurately coregister a pair of InSAR images. We analyze the effect of frequency modulation (FM) rate error in focusing on the DDI phase with [...]
Initial Exploration Free Floating CO2 Fixation Catalysts
Published: 2020-04-01
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences
Climate change as an inextricable and dire threat to humanity is well established. The primary problem stems from an excess of carbon dioxide in earths atmosphere and oceans causing a gradual increase in average temperature. With this there arises an immediate need for the alteration of this carbon dioxide into differing chemical states. Herein we perform an initial exploration of adapting the [...]
A Spatially Explicit Satellite-Derived Surface Urban Heat Island Database for Urbanized Areas in the United States: Characterization, Uncertainties, and Possible Applications
Published: 2020-03-31
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The urban heat island (UHI) effect is strongly modulated by urban-scale changes to the aerodynamic, thermal, and radiative properties of the Earth’s land surfaces. Interest in this phenomenon, both from the climatological and public health perspectives, has led to hundreds of UHI studies, mostly conducted on a city-by-city basis. These studies, however, do not provide a complete picture of the [...]
Early evidence that COVID-19 government policies reduce urban air pollution
Published: 2020-03-30
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Governments have a solemn responsibility to ensure the health and well-being of the populations they govern. The COVID-19 pandemic reveals just how serious governments take this responsibility and that restricting activity to limit pathogen spread can have other public health repercussions. Comparisons between February 2019 and 2020 air quality measures reveal that six cities that were impacted [...]
Saturation excess overland flow accelerates the spread of a generalist soil-borne pathogen
Published: 2020-03-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Plant pathogens are a major agent of disturbance in ecosystems worldwide. Disturbance by disease can alter the hydrological function of affected ecosystems. However, many plant pathogens are also sensitive to soil moisture and can be propagated by the transport of infectious tissue or reproductive structures in surface flow, so that hydrological processes can drive pathogen infection. These [...]
Streamflow depletion estimation for conjunctive water management in a heavily-stressed aquifer using analytical depletion functions
Published: 2020-03-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Groundwater pumping can lead to reductions in streamflow (‘streamflow depletion’) and estimating streamflow depletion is critical for conjunctive groundwater-surface water management. Streamflow depletion can be quantified using either analytical models, which have low data requirements but many simplifying assumptions, or numerical models, which represent physical processes more realistically [...]
Toward stable, general machine-learned models of the atmospheric chemical system
Published: 2020-03-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Atmospheric chemistry models—used as components in models that simulate air pollution and climate change—are computationally expensive. Previous studies have shown that machine-learned atmospheric chemical solvers can be orders of magnitude faster than traditional integration methods but tend to suffer from numerical instability. Here, we present a modeling framework that reduces error [...]
Evaluating the capabilities of optical/TIR imagine sensing systems for quantifying soil water content
Published: 2020-03-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Surface Soil Moisture (SSM) is a key parameter of the global energy and water cycle and knowing its spatio-temporal variability is of key importance in an array of research topics and in several practical applications alike. Recent developments in Earth Observation (EO) have indicated that SSM can be retrieved from different regions of electromagnetic spectrum and numerous approaches have been [...]
Rapid Tidal Marsh Development in Anthropogenic Backwaters
Published: 2020-03-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Geomorphology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Tidal marsh restoration and creation has been proposed as a tool to build coastal resilience in the face of rising sea level and increasing intensity of coastal storms. However, it is unclear what conditions within constructed settings will lead to the successful establishment of tidal marsh. We used sediment cores and historical geospatial data in the tidal freshwater Hudson River to identify [...]