Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Sustainability
Evidence of low watershed resilience across the Western United States
Published: 2026-01-15
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Vulnerable waters, including headwater streams and non-floodplain wetlands, are essential to watershed level resilience but notoriously difficult to measure over large spatial scales. Although individually small, vulnerable waters as a whole are integral in regulating hydrologic and biogeochemical processes. In the relatively small proportion of vulnerable waters that are continuously monitored, [...]
Democratizing Environmental Data via the Model Context Protocol: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Environmental Intelligence
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 improve efficiency and accuracy in addressing sustainability and environmental problems. Agentic AIs autonomously plan and execute towards specific goals with minimal or no human intervention; however, accessing environmental data is challenging and requires expertise, due to inherent fragmentation [...]
Global assessment of terrestrial water cycle resilience
Published: 2026-01-10
Subjects: Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Green water - transpiration, soil moisture, and land precipitation - is critical for Earth system stability and ecosystem productivity. Despite evidence of considerable and widespread change globally, its resilience, or ability to absorb and recover from disturbances, is not yet well understood. Here, we assess green water resilience using early warning signals (EWS) applied to global satellite [...]
Global Environmental Benefits of Plant-Based Diets: A Multi-Regional Input Output Analysis
Published: 2026-01-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Food Science, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Sustainability
The global food system, especially animal husbandry, is a major driver of negative environmental impacts. This paper investigates the potential of adopting more plant-based diets (vegan, vegetarian, no beef) to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, land use and related biodiversity loss, and water stress within global food supply chains. This is achieved by combining Multi-regional Input Output [...]
High-resolution seismic reservoir monitoring with multitask and transfer learning
Published: 2026-01-02
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 [...]
The puzzling yet tractable diversity of global groundwater sustainability challenges
Published: 2025-12-04
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Global groundwater sustainability is a grand challenge that requires diverse approaches to account for local contexts. Yet, global groundwater assessments often focus solely on aggregate physical trends in storage, levels, and fluxes, overlooking the diversity of social-ecological functions provided by groundwater and their associated sustainability challenges. Here, we introduce groundwater [...]
Governing the cryosphere beyond political timeframes
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Glaciology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Sustainability
Cryospheric systems are nearing irreversible thresholds, yet political processes remain misaligned with the long timescales of ice loss. Using COP30 as context, we argue that cryosphere science must inform governance capable of linking near-term decisions with long-term stability in a rapidly changing world.
Coral reef commitments are largely absent from national biodiversity and climate frameworks
Published: 2025-11-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Sustainability
Global agreements under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) call for integrated action on biodiversity loss and climate change. Yet national implementation remains poorly understood, even for ecosystems highly vulnerable to warming, such as tropical coral reefs. Bleaching-level heat stress has affected over 85% of global reefs [...]
Technical Brief: Uncovering Sub-Regional Drivers of Deforestation in the Amazon: A Tool for Targeted Solutions
Published: 2025-11-20
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability
This technical brief provides the first region-wide analysis of the commodity-specific agricultural drivers of deforestation across the Amazon region at a sub-national level, offering insights to inform more effective and equitable conservation policy. We achieve this by integrating sub-national agricultural production statistics with satellite data on land use and commodity production for each [...]
Linking Water Temperature Variability to Water Quality Dynamics in Beck Lake, an Urban Inland Lake in Chicago (2020–2024)
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Abstract This study examines the effect of climate variability on water quality in Beck Lake, an inland urban lake in Chicago, Illinois, from 2020 to 2024. The lake is maintained by the Chicago Park District and contains aquatic life such as Bluegill, Largemouth Bass, and Northern Pike. To determine climate influence, satellite-derived water temperature data were analyzed using time series [...]
FEMA Phase-Out? Catastrophic Extremes Limit Decentralization of U.S. Flood Insurance
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Hydrology, Meteorology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Risk Analysis, Sustainability, Systems Engineering
The U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) faces growing solvency and affordability pressures amid proposals to decentralize FEMA and shift disaster management to states. Many catastrophic floods span state boundaries, exposing multiple decentralized insurance pools simultaneously. Using a path-independent simulation framework that integrates risk-based premiums, [...]
The Tocantins Framework: A Machine Learning-Based Assessment of Intra-urban Thermal Anomalies
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Statistics and Probability, Sustainability
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect has been extensively studied at the city scale. Yet, the Intra-Urban Heat Island and the Intra-Urban Cool Island effects remain poorly characterized due to the absence of standardized quantification frameworks. This study introduces the Tocantins Framework, a dual-metric system combining machine learning and spatial morphology to identify and quantify [...]
Comparative Analysis of GHG Calculation Methodologies in Aviation
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Sustainability, Transportation Engineering
The aviation sector faces mounting pressure to deliver transparent, comparable greenhouse-gas (GHG) disclosures under European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). We provide a comparison of aviation GHG methodologies spanning simple factor tools and flight-specific, lifecycle-inclusive approaches. Our approach combines a structured documentation review (retaining calculators that publish [...]
Complex Realities, Simple Signals? Global Evaluation of Early Warning Signals for Forest Mortality Events
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Sustainability
Forests around the world are increasingly experiencing large-scale regional mortality events as a result of droughts and heat waves. Despite their considerable impacts on the material, non-material, and regulatory contributions of forest ecosystems to people, these mortality events remain difficult to predict. Temporal Early Warning Signals (EWS) based on the concept of Critical Slowing Down [...]
Hazomes: Earth’s natural multi-hazard terrestrial disturbance regimes
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Climate, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Planetary Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ecosystems and societies have evolved together and are shaped by local natural hazard regimes. We introduce hazomes, an Earth classification based on multi‑hazard disturbance patterns. By combining open‑source intensity and return period data for eight hazard types, we identify thousands of distinct terrestrial disturbance regimes. Hazomes aims to deepen insight into ecosystem and societal [...]