Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Sustainability

Systematic losses in tree-canopy cover over three decades revealed by integrating complementary data sources

Ruben Remelgado, Carsten Meyer

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

Sonu Kumar, Edward Park, Dung Duc Tran, et al.

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

Marc F Müller, Maria Rusca, Leonardo Bertassello, et al.

Published: 2023-10-13
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 outperform focused mitigation strategies in reducing the carbon footprint of academic travel

Tamara Ben Ari, Gaëlle Lefort, Jérome Mariette, et al.

Published: 2023-10-02
Subjects: Sustainability

The carbon footprint of academia has become a prominent concern and a burgeoning research area, with a notable focus on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from research-related travels. Mitigation strategies often promote alternatives, such as developing virtual communication or adopting sustainable transportation modes for short distances. While more ambitious strategies involving the transformation [...]

Groundwaterscapes: A global classification and mapping of groundwater’s large-scale socioeconomic, ecological, and Earth system functions

Xander Huggins, Tom Gleeson, Karen G. Villholth, et al.

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 with important social, economic, ecological, and Earth system functions. We present a new global classification and mapping of groundwater systems, which we call groundwaterscapes, that represent predominant configurations of large-scale groundwater system functions. We identify 18 groundwaterscapes, which offer a new lens to [...]

Global trade and the resilience of food supply to extreme weather exposure

Daniel Patrick Bebber, Carole Dalin, Emma Littleton, et al.

Published: 2023-08-31
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

Debaditya Chakraborty, Chetan Sharma, Hakan Basagaoglu, et al.

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

Sandy Hardian Susanto Herho, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Faiz Rohman Fajary, et al.

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

Cameron Bracken, Nathalie Voisin, Casey Burleyson, et al.

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 [...]

Improving the relevance of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for sustainability science

Katrina Szetey, Enayat Moallemi, Sabrina Chakori, et al.

Published: 2023-06-20
Subjects: Sustainability

Sustainability science is a discipline which is strongly concerned with exploring the achievement of sustainable futures. One way in which this is done is through scenarios. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), developed for climate science, have been widely adopted by modellers to analyse sustainable futures. We question whether the SSPs are fit-for-purpose for examining sustainable [...]

A paradigm shift towards decentralized cloud-integrated spatial data infrastructures: Lessons learned and solutions provided for public authorities

Florian Beyer, Patric Brandt, Michael Schmidt, et al.

Published: 2023-06-08
Subjects: Agriculture, Computer and Systems Architecture, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Sustainability

Digital transformation is a key to turn public authorities into organisations that make decisions based on data-driven insights. The use of big geodata can enable public authorities to tackle complex sustainability issues. However, the efficient management of large amounts of geodata through implementing viable data infrastructures represents a major challenge for public authorities. In this [...]

The Future in Anthropocene Science

Patrick W Keys, Rekha Warrier, Lynn Badia

Published: 2023-05-23
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability

The Anthropocene is the present time of human-caused accelerating global change, and new forms of Anthropocene risk are emerging that society has hitherto never experienced. Science and policy are grappling with the temporal and spatial magnitude of these changes, as well as the diminishing margin between science and policy itself. However, there is a gap in the transparency — and perhaps even in [...]

Spatiotemporal inconsistencies in Landsat satellite observations bias environmental-change analyses and monitoring

Ruben Remelgado, Christopher Conrad, Carsten Meyer

Published: 2023-05-19
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Sustainability

Satellite remote sensing is vital for research, monitoring, and policy addressing environmental-change and sustainability issues from climate and ecosystem changes to food and water security. Here, Landsat satellite data play a crucial role, thanks to their unique global, long-term, and high-resolution coverage. Yet, spatial and temporal data gaps in the Landsat archive may propagate into derived [...]

Ecological Flows in Southern Europe: status and trends in non-perennial rivers

Marianna Leone, Francesco Gentile, Antonio Lo Porto, et al.

Published: 2023-05-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

The concept of environmental flows (E-Flows) describes the streamflow that is necessary to maintain river ecosystems. Although a large number of methods have been developed, a delay was recorded in implementing E–Flows in non-perennial rivers. The general aim of the paper was to analyse the criticalities and the current state of implementation of the E-Flows in non-perennial rivers of southern [...]

Assessing the potential of low transmissivity aquifers for ATES systems: a case study in Flanders (Belgium)

Luka Tas, David Simpson, Thomas Hermans

Published: 2023-04-21
Subjects: Geology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

The Member States of the European Union pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95% by 2050. Shallow geothermal systems might substantially contribute by providing heating and cooling in a sustainable way through seasonally storing heat and cold in the shallow ground (<200m). When the minimum yield to install a cost-effective aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) system cannot be met, [...]

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