Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Sustainability
Global patterns of commodity-driven deforestation and associated carbon emissions
Published: 2024-04-18
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resource Economics, Statistical Models, Sustainability
Achieving global climate and biodiversity targets and ensuring future food security will require halting agriculture-driven deforestation. Accurate data on the commodities driving deforestation across time and space is crucial for informing policy development, implementation and evaluation. However, such information is currently hampered by limited and heterogeneous data availability (in both [...]
Estimating irrigation water use from remotely sensed evapotranspiration data: Accuracy and uncertainties across spatial scales
Published: 2024-02-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Irrigated agriculture is the dominant use 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 [...]
Wealth over Woe: global biases in hydro-hazard research
Published: 2024-01-13
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Hydrology, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
Floods, droughts, and rainfall-induced landslides are hydro-geomorphic hazards that affect millions of people every year. Anticipation, mitigation, and adaptation to these hazards is increasingly outpaced by their changing magnitude and frequency due to climate change. A key question for society is whether the research we pursue has the potential to address knowledge gaps and to reduce potential [...]
Land transformation on multi-decadal timescales reveals expanding croplands and settlements at the expense of tree-covered areas and mangroves in Nigeria
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Evaluating how land-cover is being transformed is essential to identify patterns necessary to infer the change trajectories and the driving factors. This study considers the case of Nigeria, where various natural ecosystems are being converted and for which a current national scale assessment is lacking. Producing Landsat-based time-series, we analyze change among land-cover types (i.e., [...]
The Certainty of Uncertainty in Atmospheric CO2 Removal: A Crisis-Response Abrupt Mitigation Scenario (CRAMS)
Published: 2023-12-05
Subjects: Climate, Sustainability
The gap between current emission trend and the expected 1.5 °C warming target forces the deployment of different carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDRs). Even though large discrepancies and uncertainties presents in studies investigating the CDR potentials, costs and side effects of bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture with CO2 storage (DACCS) and enhanced [...]
Looking upstream: analyzing the protection of the drainage area of Amazon rivers
Published: 2023-11-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
In the Amazon, aquatic ecosystems provide essential ecosystem services, including transportation, food, and livelihoods for millions of species. Land use changes and management impact these ecosystem services, and these impacts are not limited to the specific areas where they occur but propagate downstream along the drainage network. However, assessment of the accumulated human footprint upstream [...]
Systematic losses in tree-canopy cover over three decades revealed by integrating complementary data sources
Published: 2023-11-02
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Sustainability
Losses and gains in canopy cover of the world’s tree canopies affect carbon stocks, species habitats, water cycles, and human livelihoods. Consistent and multi-decadal global data on tree-canopy cover dynamics are needed for modelling climate scenarios, tracking progress towards restoration targets, and diverse other research, management and policy applications. However, most data only map binary [...]
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 [...]
Mapping the Landscape of Water and Society Research: Promising Combinations of Compatible and Complementary Disciplines
Published: 2023-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Coupled human-water systems (CHWS) are diverse and have been studied across a wide variety of disciplines. Integrating multiple disciplinary perspectives on CHWS provides a comprehensive and actionable understanding of these complex systems. While interdisciplinary integration has often remained elusive, specific combinations of disciplines might be comparably easier to integrate (compatible) [...]
Flight Quotas Hold the Most Significant Potential for Reducing Carbon Emissions from Academic Travel
Published: 2023-10-02
Subjects: Sustainability
The carbon footprint of academia has become a pressing concern and an emerging research area, with a particular focus on greenhouse gas emissions from research travels. Mitigation strategies often revolve around encouraging virtual communication and adopting more sustainable transportation modes over short distances. However, these approaches are rarely subjected to rigorous quantitative [...]
Global groundwater system archetypes identify predominant patterns in socioeconomic, ecological, and Earth system functions of groundwater
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Hydrology, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Groundwater is a dynamic component of the global water cycle that performs important social, economic, ecological, and Earth system functions. Identifying the patterns and relationships between groundwater’s diverse functions can provide important insights to aid framework, model, and theory development on interactions between groundwater and its connected systems and can help generate [...]
Global trade and the resilience of food supply to extreme weather exposure
Published: 2023-09-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Physical and Environmental Geography, Sustainability
Climate change is increasing the risk of extreme weather events, potentially threatening crop yields and global food security. A key benefit of international free trade is risk sharing, because global aggregate production is more stable than that of individual countries which may be adversely affected by extremes. Here we test the hypothesis that diverse sourcing of crops from multiple trading [...]
Mitigation effectiveness on groundwater-dependent ecosystems revealed by counterfactual AI
Published: 2023-07-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Overexploitation of groundwater threatens groundwater-bound aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem stability, underscoring the need to devise appropriate mitigation strategies. Yet, substantial scientific evidence that mitigation measures effectively protect groundwater ecosystems is presently nonexistent. We provide unique and compelling evidence, using counterfactual artificial [...]
Performance evaluation of a simple feed-forward deep neural network model applied to annual rainfall anomaly index (RAI) over Indramayu, Indonesia
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Climate, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Indramayu is a district in West Java that is known for being the leading producer of rice and brackish salt. The production of these two commodities is strongly influenced by hydroclimatological conditions, making accurate and reliable long-term estimates crucial. In this study, we evaluated a simple feed-forward deep neural network (DNN) model that could potentially be used as a candidate for [...]
Standardized Benchmark of Historical Compound Wind and Solar Energy Droughts Across the Continental United States
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Meteorology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Statistical Methodology, Sustainability
As we move towards a decarbonized grid, reliance on weather-dependent energy increases as does exposure to prolonged natural resource shortages known as energy droughts. Compound energy droughts occur when two or more predominant renewable energy sources simultaneously are in drought conditions. In this study we present a methodology and dataset for examining compound wind and solar energy [...]