Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Groundwater in the age of plastic
Published: 2024-03-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Among the emerging contaminants, microplastics (1-5,000 µm) are becoming an important issue due to their ubiquity in the environment. However, research on this emerging contaminant has been conducted mainly in marine surface waters while microplastics (MPs) are now being found in even the most remote parts of the environment. For example, in groundwater which is the primary water source which [...]
Estimating irrigation water use from remotely sensed evapotranspiration data: Accuracy and uncertainties at field, water right, and regional scales
Published: 2024-02-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Irrigated agriculture is the dominant user of water globally, but most water withdrawals are not monitored or reported. As a result, it is largely unknown when, where, and how much water is used for irrigation. Here, we evaluated the ability of remotely sensed evapotranspiration (ET) data, integrated with other datasets, to calculate irrigation water withdrawals and applications in an intensively [...]
CHIRICAHUA Field Report 2021-2023 - Sky Islands and the Desert Southwest An Independent Ecological Study
Published: 2024-02-22
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences
This Chiricahua Field Report is a combination of collected data and field observations that began in November 2021 and continued on until May 2023. The Report is about ecology and connections of life. It contains information on 400+ trees in 10 diverse ecosystems including the Madrean Sky Islands and the Riparian zones of ancient sea valleys in SE Arizona. Recent season changes, warming, fires, [...]
The Potential for Fuel Reduction to Offset Climate Warming Impacts on Wildfire Intensity in California
Published: 2024-02-21
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Increasing fuel aridity due to climate warming has and will continue to increase wildfire danger in California. In addition to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, one of the primary proposals for counteracting this increase in wildfire danger is a widespread expansion of hazardous fuel reductions. Here, we quantify the potential for fuel reduction to reduce wildfire intensity using [...]
Nitrogen Availability and Denitrification in Urban Agriculture and Regreened Vacant Lots
Published: 2024-02-07
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Many cities demolish abandoned homes and create regreened vacant lots (RVLs), and an increasingly popular, high-intensity use of RVLs is as urban agriculture (UA) sites. UA may potentially result in higher nitrogen (N) runoff to aquatic ecosystems, but this potential has not been quantified. We examined the role that varying land reuse intensity plays in determining potential for N export via [...]
Unexpected anthropogenic emission decreases explain recent atmospheric mercury concentration declines
Published: 2024-01-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Anthropogenic activities emit ~2000 Mg yr-1 of the toxic pollutant mercury (Hg) into the atmosphere, leading to long-range transport and deposition to remote ecosystems. Global anthropogenic emissions inventories report increases in Northern Hemispheric (NH) Hg emissions during the last three decades, in contradiction with the observed decline in atmospheric Hg concentrations at NH measurement [...]
Non-target screening analysis reveals changes in the molecular composition of the Belukha Ice Core between the pre-industrial and industrial periods (1830-1980 CE)
Published: 2024-01-28
Subjects: Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ice cores are environmental archives that are used to reconstruct past changes in the atmospheric aerosol composition. Most ice-core studies have focused mainly on inorganic species and a few dozen organic molecules. However, organic compounds can account for up to 90% of the aerosol composition, meaning that only a fraction of the organic constituents has been studied, limiting our understanding [...]
Deployment-invariant probability of detection characterization for aerial LiDAR methane detection
Published: 2024-01-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Accurate detection sensitivity characterization of remote methane monitoring technologies is critical for designing, implementing, and auditing effective emissions monitoring and mitigation programs. Several research groups have developed test methods based on single/double-blind controlled release protocols and regression-based data analysis techniques to create probability of detection (PoD) [...]
Unsupervised Structural Damage Assessment from Space using the Segment Anything Model (USDA-SAM): A Case Study of the 2023 Türkiye Earthquake
Published: 2024-01-23
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences
This paper explores advanced deep learning methods, specifically utilising the Segment Anything Model (SAM) along with image processing techniques, to evaluate the structural damages caused by the devastating earthquake that occurred in Turkey on February 6, 2023. Leveraging exceptionally high-resolution pre- and post-disaster imagery provided by Maxar Technologies, this paper showcases the [...]
Apportioning sources of chemicals of emerging concern along an urban river with inverse modelling
Published: 2024-01-18
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Concentrations of chemicals in river water provide crucial information for assessing environmental exposure to fertilisers and insecticides, heavy metals, illicit drugs, pathogens, pharmaceuticals, plastics and perfluorinated substances among others. However, using concentrations measured along waterways to identify sources of contaminants and predict their fate is complicated by downstream [...]
Environmental Signal Propagation in Non-stationary Systems: The Impact of Delta Advance on Terrestrial to Marine Information Transfer
Published: 2024-01-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
When interpreting environmental signals in the deep marine sedimentary archive, separating the record of local flow and sediment dynamics from that of the terrestrial transport system that feeds it can be challenging. We used a physical experiment to study the dynamics of flow and sedimentation on a prograding, hyperpycnal flow-dominated delta, shelf and submarine slope subject to slow rates of [...]
Mineral precipitation and geometry alteration in porous structures: How to upscale variations in permeability-porosity relationship?
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Porous materials in natural and engineered environments are subject to morphological changes resulting from interacting chemical and physical processes. The complexity of coupled flow, transport, and chemical processes that occur on different temporal and spatial scales makes it difficult to predict the resulting porosity and permeability alterations. Delineating the controls of mineral [...]
Untangling intercropping in heterogeneous smallholder maize-cassava farming systems with remote sensing
Published: 2023-12-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earth observation approaches for large-scale crop monocultures are often not transferable to heterogeneous smallholder systems. Key challenges in this regard are intercropping, high intra-field crop type variability, wide sowing windows, presence of non-crop vegetation and small but variable field sizes. Currently, studies on smallholder agriculture mainly focus on specific crops and seldom [...]
GEE-PICX: Generating cloud-free Sentinel-2 and Landsat image composites and spectral indices for custom areas and time frames - a Google Earth Engine web application
Published: 2023-12-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Earth observation satellites are collecting vast amounts of free and openly accessible data with immense potential to support environmental, economic, and social fields. As the availability of remotely sensed data increases, so do the methods for accessing and processing it. Many solutions exist for creating cloud-free image composites from often cloudy satellite data, but these typically require [...]
Comprehensive review of the annual haze episode in Northern Thailand
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Public Health
The mountainous part of northern Thailand is subject to an intense haze episode occurring almost every year between January and May. In the last couple of decades, this atmospheric phenomenon has been extensively covered in the media and is now a main concern for the population living in this area. In this review, we synthesized the information available from hundreds of publications on air [...]