Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Balancing Open Science and Data Privacy in the Water Sciences
Published: 2019-03-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Hydrology, Library and Information Science, Nature and Society Relations, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science, Water Resource Management
Open science practices such as publishing data and code are transforming water science by enabling synthesis and enhancing reproducibility. However, as research increasingly bridges the physical and social science domains (e.g., socio-hydrology), there is the potential for well-meaning researchers to unintentionally violate the privacy and security of individuals or communities by sharing [...]
Agriculture-aquaculture transitions on the lower Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, 1972-2017
Published: 2019-03-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Recent decades have seen a considerable increase in shrimp aquaculture in tropical and subtropical developing countries. This practice is controversial due to its potential for serious economic, food security, and environmental impacts. Of particular concern is the widespread practice of intensive aquaculture in and near mangrove ecosystems where many shrimp species spawn. However, while [...]
Anthropogenic activities alter drought termination
Published: 2019-03-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Despite the increasing influence of human activities on water resources in our current Anthropocene era, the impacts of these activities on the duration, rate and timing of the recovery of drought events, known as the drought termination phase, remain unknown. Here, we present the first assessment of how different human activities (i.e. water abstractions, reservoirs, water transfers) affect [...]
Beneficial land use change: Strategic expansion of new biomass plantations can reduce environmental impacts from EU agriculture
Published: 2019-03-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Society faces the double challenge of increasing biomass production to meet the future demands for food, materials and bioenergy, while addressing negative impacts of current (and future) land use. In the discourse, land use change (LUC) has often been considered as negative, referring to impacts of deforestation and expansion of biomass plantations. However, strategic establishment of suitable [...]
Average daily flow of microplastics through a tertiary wastewater treatment plant over a ten-month period
Published: 2019-03-12
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Microplastics (MPs, <5 mm in size) are classified as emerging contaminants but treatment processes are not designed to remove these small particles. Wastewater treatment systems have been proposed as pathways for MPs pollution to receiving waters but quantitative and qualitative data on MP occurrence and transport remains limited, hindering risk assessment and regulation. Here, for the first [...]
Wetropolis extreme rainfall and flood demonstrator: from mathematical design to outreach and research
Published: 2019-03-11
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Wetropolis is a transportable "table-top" demonstration model with extreme rainfall and flooding events. It is a conceptual model with random rainfall, river flow, a flood plain, an upland reservoir, a porous moor, representing the upper catchment and visualising groundwater flow, and a city which can flood following extreme rainfall. Its aim is to let the viewer experience extreme rainfall and [...]
From bore-soliton-splash to rogue waves, a new wave-energy device and extreme tsunami run-up
Published: 2019-03-11
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
We explore extreme nonlinear water-wave amplification in a contraction or, analogously, wave amplification in crossing seas. The latter case can lead to extreme or rogue-wave formation at sea. First, amplification of a solitary-water-wave compound running into a contraction is disseminated experimentally, for small-scale and larger wavetanks. Maximum amplification in our bore-soliton-splash [...]
Hydrodynamic control of gas-exchange velocity in small streams
Published: 2019-03-02
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Hydraulic Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Planetary Sciences
Gas exchange is a critical component of any biogeochemical mass balance model of dissolved gases in aquatic systems, yet the magnitude and drivers of spatial and temporal variations of air-water exchange rates in shallow streams are poorly understood. We investigated the relationships between gas exchange velocity of carbon dioxide and methane and flow hydraulics at different sections along a [...]
Diagnosing spatial biases and uncertainties in global fire emissions inventories: Indonesia as regional case study
Published: 2019-02-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Models of atmospheric composition rely on fire emissions inventories to reconstruct and project impacts of biomass burning on air quality, public health, climate, ecosystem dynamics, and land-atmosphere exchanges. Many such global inventories use satellite measurements of active fires and/or burned area from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). However, differences across [...]
Human-induced fire regime shifts during 19th century industrialization: a robust fire regime reconstruction using northern Polish lake sediments
Published: 2019-02-22
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Fire regime shifts are driven by climate and natural vegetation changes, but can be strongly affected by human land management. Yet, it is poorly known how exactly humans have influenced fire regimes prior to active wildfire suppression. Among the last 250 years, the human contribution to the global increase in fire occurrence during the mid-19th century is especially unclear, as data sources are [...]
High-resolution prediction of organic matter concentration with hyperspectral imaging on a sediment core
Published: 2019-02-21
Subjects: Analytical Chemistry, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Optics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Sedimentology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
In the case of environmental samples, the use of a chemometrics-based prediction model is highly challenging because of the difficulty in experimentally creating a well-ranged reference sample set. In this study, we present a methodology using short wave infrared hyperspectral imaging to create a partial least squares regression model on a cored sediment sample. It was applied to a sediment core [...]
Bayesian atmospheric correction over land: Sentinel-2/MSI and Landsat 8/OLI
Published: 2019-02-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences
Mitigating the impact of atmospheric effects on optical remote sensing data is critical for monitoring intrinsic land processes and developing Analysis Ready Data (ARD). This work develops an approach to this for the NERC NCEO medium resolution ARD Landsat 8 (L8) and Sentinel 2 (S2) products, called Sensor Invariant Atmospheric Correction (SIAC). The contribution of the work is to phrase and [...]
Long Range Correlation in Redox Potential Fluctuations Signals Energetic Efficiency of Bacterial Fe(II) Oxidation
Published: 2019-02-21
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Differentiating biotic and abiotic processes in nature remains a persistent challenge, specifically in evaluating microbial contributions to geochemical processes through time. Building on previous work reporting that biologically-influenced systems exhibit stronger long-range correlation than abiotic systems, this study evaluated the relationship between long-range correlation of redox [...]
Opportunities for Classes of Geography in the High School: the Use of ’CORINE’ Project Data, Satellite Images and IDRISI GIS for Geovisualization
Published: 2019-02-13
Subjects: Adult and Continuing Education, Education, Educational Methods, Environmental Education, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Higher Education, Human Geography, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Science and Mathematics Education, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Presented work illustrates application of the GIS based processing of various geographic data: satellite images and CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) layers at the lessons of geography in the high schools and universities. The research illustrates GIS application for understanding, visualizing and modeling landscapes of the Earth. Practically, the work aims to demonstrate [...]
Gap Filling of High-Resolution Soil Moisture for SMAP/Sentinel-1: A Two-Layer Machine Learning-Based Framework
Published: 2019-02-11
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
As the most recent 3 km soil moisture product from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, the SMAP/Sentinel-1 L2_SM_SP product has a unique capability to provide global-scale 3 km soil moisture estimates through the fusion of radar and radiometer microwave observations. The spatial and temporal availability of this high-resolution soil moisture product depends on concurrent radar and [...]