Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
A benchmark deep learning dataset for the classification of supraglacial lake drainage mechanism across the central-west Greenland Ice Sheet
Published: 2026-05-29
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Supraglacial lakes on the Greenland Ice Sheet drain through physically distinct pathways: hydrofracture, moulins, lateral stream routing, and crevasse-fields. Each drainage mechanism carries unique implications for ice sheet dynamics. Existing automated classifications reduce each lake's drainage behavior to a time-series of scalar values representing the observed water surface-area and classify [...]
CryoSentinel: A Multimodal Foundation-Model Segmenter for Glacial Lakes in High Mountain Asia from Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 Optical, and Copernicus DEM Imagery
Published: 2026-05-17
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Hydrology
Glacial-lake outburst floods (GLOFs) are the dominant climate-driven hazard in High Mountain Asia, and reliable lake-extent segmentation is the prerequisite for every downstream early-warning workflow. We present CryoSentinel, a multimodal foundation-model semantic segmenter built on the IBM/ESA TerraMind 1.0 Large encoder (1.1 B parameters) with a UperNet decoder, fine-tuned on 5,614 [...]
A Blueprint for Integrated Climate Intelligence
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Planetary Sciences, Sustainability
Climate information is advancing faster than the decision systems designed to use it. Emergency response operates on timescales of hours, whereas societal adaptation unfolds over decades. Yet climate science, impact assessment and policy remain poorly integrated, limiting coherent action across timescales. We argue that artificial intelligence should be developed not only as a domain-specific [...]
From 2D labels to 3D structure: Scalable label transfer and benchmarking of 3D vegetation models in rangeland ecosystems
Published: 2026-05-03
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
Three-dimensional (3D) characterisation of vegetation structure at the level of individual growth forms is critical for understanding ecosystem function and resilience, yet remains challenging in rangelands because vegetation is sparse, low-stature, and structurally heterogeneous. Recent 3D deep-learning models perform strongly in forests, but their transfer beyond closed-canopy benchmarks is [...]
An End-to-End Workflow for Processing Multilingual Stakeholder Workshop Data: A Soil Health Case Study
Published: 2026-04-11
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Soil Science
This paper presents an end-to-end workflow for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of multilingual stakeholder workshop data related to soil health. Stakeholder workshops often produce diverse qualitative and ordinal data which is difficult to process consistently and transparently, especially in multilingual settings. The proposed workflow provides clear guidance for collecting, [...]
Frictional weakening in the highly mobile 2025 Blatten (Switzerland) rock–ice avalanche
Published: 2026-03-17
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Dynamics and Dynamical Systems, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Multivariate Analysis, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Risk Analysis
Cascading slope failures in alpine environments are intensifying as glaciers retreat and slope stability adjusts to a warming climate. Yet, the mechanisms governing such large, rapidly evolving events remain poorly understood. The 28 May 2025 rock–ice avalanche from Birch Glacier, Switzerland ($\approx9.3\times10^{6}~\mathrm{m^3}$), which devastated part of the village of Blatten, provides a [...]
Sub-pixel mapping of disturbance and tree mortality dynamics from Sentinel-2 time series around the globe
Published: 2026-02-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Elevated forest disturbances and excess tree mortality are increasingly reported worldwide. Yet existing assessments are either based on patchy terrestrial observations or on large-scale satellite products, which are limited in resolution to pixel-level, binary tree loss detection. This leaves a blind spot on fine-scale disturbances where only a few trees are declining in an otherwise intact [...]
Emergent Spatio-Semantic Structure in Large Language Model Embedding Spaces
Published: 2026-02-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Geographic Information Sciences
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in geospatial applications typically as generators of geographic text or as natural language interfaces to spatial data. Here, we explore whether LLM embedding spaces can instead function as geospatial representations that can be exploited directly. Using embeddings extracted from Airbnb property descriptions in London, we show that [...]
A Vision for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Great Lakes Research and Management
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Water Resource Management
The Laurentian Great Lakes are a vital freshwater resource and a regionally significant natural system facing complex, persistent, and compounding challenges from climate change, nutrient loading, and invasive species. The increasing availability of observational data, coupled with advances in computational power and machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods, presents an [...]
Hybrid Physics–AI Ecosystem Simulations Improve Biogeochemical Predictions in Temperate Shelf Seas
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biochemistry, Biogeochemistry, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Marine Biology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oceanography, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Biogeochemical models form a core part of marine forecasting and climate projections, yet they suffer from persistent biases in predicting key ecosystem variables, creating challenges across regional and global scales. To address this, we developed an AI-augmented three-dimensional hybrid framework that integrates machine-learning corrections directly into a process-based model’s productivity [...]
What Companies Say vs. What Matters: LLM Analysis of Biodiversity Disclosures in Oil and Gas
Published: 2026-02-01
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
The power system ecosystem encompasses infrastructure intensive industries such as electric utilities, hydropower operators, oil and gas producers, and mining companies supplying critical minerals. These industries share a common challenge: their physical assets interact extensively with natural ecosystems, creating dependencies and impacts that increasingly draw investor and stakeholder [...]
Automating glacier facies classification: pan-European dataset and deep learning baseline
Published: 2026-01-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Glaciology
Glacier facies play a critical role in understanding the mass balance of glaciers, offering insights into accumulation and melting processes. Large-scale mapping of glacier facies from satellite data is therefore essential for monitoring glacier response to climate change and informing climate policies. In this study, we present the largest glacier facies dataset ever compiled for Europe, [...]
Facilitating AI-Driven Sustainability: A Service-Oriented Ar-chitecture for Interoperable Environmental Data Access
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology, Software Engineering, Sustainability
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly agentic AI, have created opportunities to enhance global sustainability by improving the efficiency and accuracy of environmental monitoring and response systems. Agentic AIs autonomously plan and execute towards specific goals with minimal or no human intervention; however, accessing environmental data is challenging and requires expertise, [...]
HyTC-TaNet: A Hybrid Deep Learning Model Capturing Multi-day Temporal Dependencies for Daily Mean Air Temperature Estimation with Spatial Applicability Analysis
Published: 2026-01-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
High-resolution seismic reservoir monitoring with multitask and transfer learning
Published: 2026-01-03
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computational Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
High-resolution real-time monitoring of reservoir changes is essential during CO2 injection or hydrocarbon production. Here, we leverage convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that employ multitask (MTL) and transfer (TL) learning to accurately predict relevant reservoir parameters from time-lapse seismic data. CNNs are initially trained to estimate the P-wave velocity from 2D multicomponent [...]