Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Defining Plastic Pollution Hotspots
Published: 2023-11-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology
Plastic pollution in the natural environment poses a growing threat to ecosystems and human health, prompting urgent needs for monitoring, prevention and clean-up measures, and new policies. To effectively prioritize resource allocation and mitigation strategies, it is key to identify and define plastic hotspots. UNEP’s draft global agreement on plastic pollution mandates prioritizing hotspots, [...]
ACCE DTP EDI Report 2023
Published: 2023-11-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Environmental Sciences, Higher Education
Underrepresentation of minoritised and historically disadvantaged groups is prevalent in PhD recruitment, particularly in environmental sciences. The environmental science focussed ‘Adapting to the Challenges of a Changing Environment’ Doctoral Training Partnership (ACCE DTP) was awarded funding from the Natural Environment Research Council for an EDI-centred project. This project aimed to [...]
A framework for integrated monitoring of status and trends in water balance, water chemistry and contamination of shallow lakes across a remote dynamic freshwater delta
Published: 2023-11-05
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Systematic and sustainable monitoring approaches capable of tracking the status and trends of keystone characteristics are critical for detecting aquatic ecosystem degradation, identifying the influence of multiple potential stressors, informing environmental protection policy and anticipating future change. At remote lake-rich landscapes, ability to implement and maintain long-term monitoring is [...]
Data for Critical Infrastructure Network Modelling of Natural Hazard Impacts: Needs and Influence on Model Characteristics
Published: 2023-11-03
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Risk Analysis
Natural hazards impact the interdependent infrastructure networks that keep modern society functional. While a variety of critical infrastructure network (CIN) modelling approaches are available to represent CI networks on different scales and analyse the impacts of natural hazards, a recurring challenge for all modelling approaches is the availability and accessibility of sufficiently [...]
Sounding out the river: Seismic and hydroacoustic monitoring of bedload transport in an alluvial river
Published: 2023-11-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seismological observations provide a non-invasive and continuous means of indirect measurement of fluvial bedload transport (i.e. the transport of coarse granular material, as a function of water depth, in rivers). However, a significant challenge remains in independently characterising the seismic signature of bedload transport from other sources, such as turbulence. Previous research suggested [...]
A Portable low-cost Device to Quantify Advective Gas Fluxes from Mofettes into the Lower Atmosphere: First Application to Starzach Mofettes (Germany)
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In this study, we introduce a portable low-cost device for in situ gas emission measurement from focused point sources of CO2, such as mofettes. We assess the individual sensors' precision with calibration experiments and perform an independent verification of the system's ability to measure gas flow rates in the range of liters per second. The results from one week of continuous CO2 flow [...]
Pacific shoreline erosion and accretion patterns controlled by El Niño/Southern Oscillation
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In the Pacific Basin, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant mode of interannual climate variability, driving substantial changes in oceanographic forcing and impacting Pacific coastlines. Yet, how sandy coasts respond to these basin-scale changes has to date been limited to a few long-term beach monitoring sites, predominantly on developed coasts. Here we use 38 years of Landsat [...]
Last millennium climate variability in the Romanian Carpathians: a synthesis
Published: 2023-10-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The Carpathian Mountains span Central and Eastern Europe and provide vital ecosystem functions and services. For this reason, the conservation status of the Carpathians is critical due to environmental pressures such as deforestation and the impacts of climate change, which has significantly affected the region's ecosystem dynamics and communities through increased frequency of floods and [...]
A Novel Approach for Predicting Large Wildfires Using Machine Learning Towards Environmental Justice via Environmental Remote Sensing and Atmospheric Reanalysis Data across the United States
Published: 2023-10-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Large wildfires (>125 hectares) in the United States account for over 95% of the burned area each year. Predicting large wildfires is imperative, however, current wildfire predictive models are region-based and computationally intensive. Using a scalable model based on easily available environmental and atmospheric data, this research aims to accurately predict across the United States whether [...]
Impacts of the African Humid Period termination may have been delayed in the Atlantic Sahara
Published: 2023-10-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The paleoenvironmental changes recorded at the Khnifiss Lagoon, on the Saharan Atlantic coast, southern Morocco, during the last 3.5 kyrs BP puts another piece to the puzzle on the intricate relationship between North Atlantic climate patterns and climate variations in Northwest Africa. This study shed light on the hydroclimatic dynamics during a pivotal climatic period: the transition from the [...]
Pygoda: a graphical interface to efficiently visualise and explore large sets of geolocated time series
Published: 2023-10-24
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Climate, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Fresh Water Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces, Hydrology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Statistics and Probability, Spatial Science
Modern-day data sets in geosciences may comprise hundreds or thousands of geolocated time series. Despite all the automated tools and new algorithms now available to process and prepare those data before using them in research projects, it can be useful or even necessary to visualise and investigate them manually. Whether it be for data quality assessment, for the preparation of a training data [...]
A Deep Learning framework to map riverbed sand mining budgets in large tropical deltas
Published: 2023-10-20
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Sedimentology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Rapid urbanization has dramatically increased the demand for river sand, leading to soaring sand extraction rates that often exceed natural replenishment in many rivers globally. However, our understanding of the geomorphic and social-ecological impacts arising from Sand Mining (SM) remains limited, primarily due to insufficient data on sand extraction rates. Conventionally, bathymetry surveys [...]
Presence of Emerging Contaminants and Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Private Well Water
Published: 2023-10-19
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Occurrence of emerging contaminants (ECs) including parent compounds, their metabolites, and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and their relationships to common chemical and microbial indicators have rarely been investigated for private wells. In this study, occurrence of 109 parent compounds (ECs), 29 EC metabolites, and 15 ARGs were screened in private well water samples from 57 Southwest [...]
Effective Disinfection of Escherichia coli Contaminated Water Using Silver Nanoparticle-Decorated Magnetic Cobalt Cores
Published: 2023-10-12
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
In recent years, the development of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and their application in wastewater treatment have emerged as highly effective disinfection methods. Wastewater treatment processes effectively remove silver particles and colloids (most processes exceed 95%), but this still leaves notable concentrations that escape to effluent-receiving waters. To address this challenge, in this [...]
Knowledge co-production for identifying sustainability indicators and prioritising solutions for food and land system transformation in Australia.
Published: 2023-10-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
The sustainable transformation of food and land systems requires the rapid implementation and scaling up of a broad suite of solutions to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Decision-making frameworks are needed to identify suitable indicators and prioritise solutions at national scales. Using a knowledge co-production framework, we convened 150 stakeholders from 100+ organisations to [...]