Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Spectrally structured CNN encoding for interpretable and edge-ready fractional vegetation cover mapping using UAS multispectral and imaging spectroscopy
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing
Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is a key indicator of semi-arid ecosystem condition, but non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) remains difficult to map because dry or senescent vegetation, litter, woody debris, and standing dead material can overlap spectrally with photosynthetic vegetation (PV) and bare ground (BE), especially where shadows, exposed bare earth surfaces, and mixed vegetation-soil [...]
Coastal plain retention modulates flashflood chlorophylla anomalies in the Red Sea: a CPRI based multisite analysis
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The eastern Red Sea coastal margin is among the most oligotrophic large marine ecosystems on Earth, where episodic nutrient pulses from flash floods can transiently fuel phytoplankton blooms. Yet, the extent to which upstream coastal-plain geomorphology modulates the magnitude of these flood-driven chlorophylla (Chla) responses remains poorly quantified. We tested the hypothesis that narrower [...]
Resolving microscale near surface temperature variability during a heatwave using a dense sensor network
Published: 2026-06-29
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
High-resolution measurements of near-surface temperature are essential for understanding environmental responses to extreme weather events, yet are rarely available from dense, regularly spaced in situ measurement grids. Here, we analyse temperature measurements derived from a dense network of over 3,000 nodal seismometers deployed across a 6 km² area in North Yorkshire, UK, during the July 2022 [...]
Translation and commentary on Carl Eduard Ney’s (1893/1894) Ueber die Messung des an den Schäften der Bäume herabfliessenden Regenwassers
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
Stemflow is now recognized as a hydrologically consequential pathway, yet much of twentieth-century forest hydrology treated it as negligible. This paper revisits a counterpoint, a formal exchange regarding stemflow between Government and Forestry Councilor C.E. Ney and Imperial-Royal Trainee Dr. E. Hoppe at the first Congress of the International Union of Forestry Research Stations (Mariabrunn, [...]
Air quality and health impacts of Data Center electricity demand in the United States
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is associated with a substantial growth in electricity demand from data centers in the US, yet the resulting air quality and public health impacts remain poorly quantified. Data centers represent large, near-continuous demands that fundamentally alter power system dispatch and emissions. To quantify the ambient air pollution and associated premature [...]
Where to Watch the Water: Multi-Sensor Network Design Optimization for Inland Flood Detection
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Inland flood detection is often constrained less by sensor availability than by where sensors are placed along branching river networks, especially in ungauged headwaters where floods often initiate. We present a three-phase, decisionfocused framework for designing basin-by-basin multi-sensor flood detection networks that coordinate water-level, discharge, and camera sensors while explicitly [...]
A Phanerozoic Atlas of Earth’s Atmosphere, Surface, and Interior Derived from the PANALESIS Plate Tectonic Model
Published: 2026-06-22
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Other Environmental Sciences, Tectonics and Structure
Reconstructing the Earth system evolution through deep time requires spatially consistent, multi‑layer datasets that integrate geological, geophysical, and climatic information. Here we present a unified, high‑resolution (10×10km) global dataset describing the Earth’s evolution over the past 545 million years. This atlas provides 45 time slices spanning the Phanerozoic, each including quantified [...]
AEF-Econ: Toward Plug-and-Play Socioeconomic Foundation Embeddings from AlphaEarth for Urban Remote Sensing
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) unify global remote sensing foundation embeddings through multimodal self-supervised learning, but their pretraining focuses on physical land-surface signals, limiting plug-and-play use in socioeconomic tasks. We integrate seven heterogeneous data streams across 36 Chinese cities over eight years—AEF embeddings, population, nighttime lights, remote sensing indices, [...]
Ecosystem Metabolism as an Early Warning Indicator of Lake Algal Blooms
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Algal blooms represent ecosystem state shifts that degrade drinking water, restrict recreation, threaten public health, and lower property values. Detecting blooms in advance on management relevant timescales of days to weeks can support proactive intervention. Early warning statistics derived from indicator time series offer a framework for detecting state shifts, but the use of lake metabolic [...]
An efficient method for deriving volatility basis sets from thermodenuder and particle levitation data.
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Transport Phenomena
Deriving a volatility basis set (VBS) from measurements of particle evaporation in a thermodenuder or single-particle levitation apparatus has traditionally relied on repeated numerical solution of the evaporation equations to find the VBS that best reproduces observed particle sizes. This approach is computationally demanding and offers little insight into the factors that control the retrieval. [...]
Mangrove Loss and Growing Coastal Flood Exposure in East Malaysia: A Multi-Decadal Analysis with Sea Level Rise Projections
Published: 2026-06-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Mangrove forests provide critical coastal flood protection, yet their ongoing loss in combination with sea level rise creates a compounding exposure dynamic that remains poorly quantified at sub-national scale across Southeast Asia. This study presents the first systematic, multi-decadal analysis of mangrove loss and coastal flood exposure change for the 10 km coastal buffer of East Malaysia [...]
Impacts of Potential Solar Radiation Modification: Systematic Review Reveals Challenges and Opportunities
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences
Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a proposed temporary intervention to limit global warming while mitigation efforts continue. Understanding its potential consequences for human and natural systems is essential for informed deliberations. We conducted a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature on SRM impacts published through May 2024, identifying 289 studies, including 261 primary [...]
Spatially Distributed Land-Use Efficiency Assessment under SDG Indicator 11.3.1: The Case of Greater Manila Area, Philippines
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Indicator 11.3.1 assesses urban land-use efficiency (LUE) through the relationship between land consumption rate (LCR) and population growth rate (PGR), commonly expressed as LCRPGR. However, city-level implementation produces a single value that can mask where efficient or inefficient urban development occurs. This study develops and demonstrates a spatially [...]
Two decades of kilometer-scale daily PM2.5 from satellite observations and machine learning reveal geographically diverging exposure in Ghana
Published: 2026-06-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a major contributor to global burden of disease, yet air quality data remain sparse in many low- and middle-income countries, limiting nationwide monitoring and effective policy development. We address this gap by developing a high-resolution gridded (1 km × 1 km) dataset for daily surface PM2.5 concentrations in Ghana from 2005 to 2025 by training [...]
Climate overshoot and the insurability frontier: peak stress, domestic capacity, and market retreat risk
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Sciences
Climate overshoot can create mid-century peaks in climate stress before end-century temperatures stabilize, but its implications for insurance availability remain poorly understood. We assess subnational insurance market exit risk under overshoot across 1,590 first-order administrative regions in 88 countries, covering 4.54 billion people. Combining ADM1-level multi-hazard climate stress, an [...]