Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Natural forests of the world - a 2020 baseline for deforestation and degradation monitoring
Published: 2025-04-29
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Informed decisions to reduce deforestation, protect biodiversity, and curb carbon emissions require not just knowing where forests are, but understanding their composition. Identifying natural forests, which serve as critical biodiversity hotspots and major carbon sinks, is particularly valuable. We developed a novel global natural forest map for 2020 at 10 m resolution. This map can support [...]
Enhancing and Interpreting Deep Learning for Sea Ice Charting using the AutoICE Benchmark
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography
Accurate mapping of sea ice is crucial for marine navigation and monitoring climate change. Automating sea ice mapping remains challenging due to remotely-sensed signal ambiguity, the dynamic nature of sea ice, and limited field measurements. The AutoICE challenge recently introduced a benchmark to advance deep learning for sea ice mapping. Top-performing solutions used the U-Net architecture [...]
Mapping Responsible AI Workflows for Geospatial Data Science: Developing the I-GUIDE Data Ethics Toolkit
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Library and Information Science, Sustainability
AI workflows in geospatial data science promise substantial societal benefits yet pose persistent challenges of ethical risk, transparency, and reproducibility. Current guidance, ranging from high‑level principles to isolated documentation templates, remains difficult to translate into day‑to‑day research practice, especially for teams operating under tight deadlines. This paper reports the [...]
Three times accelerated glacier area loss in Svalbard revealed by deep learning
Published: 2025-03-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The rapid warming in polar regions highlights the need to monitor climate change impacts such as glacier retreat and related global sea level rise. Glacier area is an essential climate variable but its tracking is complicated by the labour-intensive manual digitisation of satellite imagery. Here we introduce ICEmapper, a deep learning model that maps glacier outlines from Sentinel-1 time series [...]
How to deal w___ missing input data
Published: 2025-03-15
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Deep learning hydrologic models have made their way from research to applications. More and more national hydrometeorological agencies, hydro power operators, and engineering consulting companies are building Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models for operational use cases. All of these efforts come across similar sets of challenges—challenges that are different from those in controlled scientific [...]
Predicting Land Surface Temperature With Uncertainty Estimation Using a Community Sensor Network and Machine Learning
Published: 2025-02-01
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Sustainability
Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) are areas in cities that experience higher temperatures than surrounding areas due to construction features such as buildings, roads, and a general lack of vegetation. UHIs, which pose a threat to public health while also increasing energy usage, are often defined using land surface temperatures. Our study demonstrates how a community sensor network from the Baltimore [...]
A Conversational Intelligent Assistant for Enhanced Operational Support in Floodplain Management with Multimodal Data
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Floodplain management is crucial for mitigating flood risks and enhancing community resilience, yet floodplain managers often face significant challenges, including the complexity of data analysis, regulatory compliance, and effective communication with diverse stakeholders. This study introduces Floodplain Manager AI, an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) based virtual assistant designed to [...]
Tracking Drought Impacts from Texts: Towards AI-Assisted Drought Impact Detection
Published: 2024-12-07
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology
Drought is recognized for its extensive and varied impacts. Based on the drought-related textual datasets from the National Drought Mitigation Center, our research applies advanced artificial intelligence techniques, including deep learning and natural language processing, to enhance the monitoring of multifaceted drought impacts in the United States. This study also delves into predicting [...]
Towards statistical modeling of chlorophyll-a concentrations in Balikpapan Bay, Indonesia: Implications for algal bloom detection
Published: 2024-10-26
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Marine Biology, Oceanography
This study presents a comprehensive statistical analysis of chlorophyll-a dynamics in Balikpapan Bay, Indonesia, combining time series analysis, extreme value modeling, and machine learning techniques to understand phytoplankton variability near Indonesia's planned new capital city. Analysis of daily chlorophyll-a concentrations (2019-2021) revealed a non-Gaussian distribution (skewness = 2.212, [...]
Application of machine learning methods to forecast petrophysical properties in basalts of the Serra Geral Group: Implications for carbon storage
Published: 2024-10-22
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study applies machine learning techniques for forecasting petrophysical properties (density, porosity, and permeability) in the basalts of the Serra Geral Group, located in the Paraná Basin, Brazil. These properties are crucial for the successful implementation of carbon capture and storage (CCS), an important technology to combat climate change. Employing machine learning models—XGBoost, [...]
DARTS: Multi-year database of AI-detected retrogressive thaw slumps in the circum-arctic permafrost region
Published: 2024-10-20
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Retrogressive Thaw Slumps (RTS) and Active Layer Detachment Slides (ALD) are widespread thermal mass-wasting hillslope failures triggered by thawing permafrost. Despite increasing rates of these failures, knowledge about their pan-arctic spatial and temporal distribution remains limited. We present the Database of AI-detected Arctic RTS and ALD footprints (DARTS), the largest hillslope [...]
MicroCrystalNet: An Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Microcrystal Classification using Scanning Electron Microscope Petrography
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Engineering, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences
Morphological characterization of microcrystalline rock textures typically relies upon the visual interpretation and manual measurement of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imagery: a practice fraught with subjectivity, inefficiency, sampling bias, and data loss. We introduce a state-of-the-art computer vision pipeline, built on deep learning architectures, for segmenting and classifying [...]
Implementation of the Peruvian Earthquake Early Warning System
Published: 2024-06-12
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Geophysics and Seismology
We present the implementation and testing of the seismological components of the Peruvian Earthquake Early Warning System (Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Peruano, SASPe). SASPe is designed to send alert messages to areas located within a given distance from the epicenter of large (magnitude ≥ 6.0) subduction earthquakes, with a first alert based on data available 3 seconds after the arrival [...]
Integrating Conversational AI Agents for Enhanced Water Quality Analytics: Development of a Novel Data Expert System
Published: 2024-06-01
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil Engineering, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Software Engineering
Despite advancements in environmental monitoring, the gap between data collection and user-friendly data interpretation remains a significant challenge, especially in the domain of water quality management. This paper introduces the Artificial Intelligence Data Expert (AI-DE), a novel data analytics system that is designed to facilitate on-demand analysis of time-series sensor data related to [...]
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models in Hydrological Applications
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology
Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable advancements, achieving a level of intelligence comparable to human capabilities. In this study, we conduct an analysis of the latest Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), specifically Multimodal-GPT, GPT-4 Vision, Gemini and LLaVa, focusing on their application in the hydrology domain. The hydrology domain holds [...]