Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Agriculture
Global potential of integrated biorefineries for leaf protein and sugar: Producing sustainable food and preventing starvation in catastrophes
Published: 2026-01-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Chemical Engineering, Engineering, Food Science, Risk Analysis
To accommodate population growth and shifting diets, the global protein supply must increase. Simultaneously, rising climate variability increases agricultural yield shocks, disrupting conventional crops. Worse, global catastrophes such as nuclear war or pandemics could collapse the global food system. Here, we turn to the potential of grasslands and plentiful legume biomass (e.g., alfalfa, [...]
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
Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of Fisherfolk in Ghana Toward Climate Change: A Cross-Sectional Study
Published: 2025-12-30
Subjects: Agriculture
Background Climate change poses serious risks to coastal livelihoods and marine ecosystems. Ghana’s artisanal fisheries sector is vital for food security and employment, yet fisherfolk’s climate adaptation awareness remains understudied. Methods A descriptive cross-sectional survey was conducted among 800 fisherfolk across three coastal regions. Structured questionnaires assessed knowledge, [...]
Comprehensive Assessment of Flood Risk and Community Impact of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in Iowa
Published: 2025-12-27
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Life Sciences
Flooding presents a significant risk to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), especially in regions increasingly affected by extreme weather events. This study uses advanced geospatial analysis techniques to assess the environmental and economic vulnerabilities of 12,703 CAFOs across Iowa, United States. We focused on the exposure of CAFOS to 100-year and 500-year floodplains, [...]
Explainable Machine Learning for Wheat Biomass Integrating Sentinel-1/2, PlanetScope and In-Situ Weather Data
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences
Global food security faces increasing challenges from climate change, making accurate monitoring of essential crops like wheat (Triticum aestivum) critical. This research introduces an explainable machine learning (ML) framework to estimate and forecast wheat above-ground biomass (AGB) in central Chile across the 2020–2023 growing seasons. The study uses a two-stage approach: first, in-season AGB [...]
Heat stress as an emerging constraint on global dairy systems: global gridded CMIP6 projections and national-scale milk loss exposure
Published: 2025-12-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences
Dairy production is a key component of global food systems, providing essential nutrients and supporting rural livelihoods, but it is increasingly exposed to heat stress under climate change. Here, we present a spatially explicit global assessment of heat-stress exposure and potential milk-yield losses using bias-corrected CMIP6 climate projections at 0.25° resolution combined with gridded [...]
Agrivoltaics can reduce heat exposure for farmworkers
Published: 2025-11-20
Subjects: Agriculture
Heat exposure endangers over 850 million farmworkers, with agricultural labor projected to account for 60% of heat-related working-hour losses by 2030. Agrivoltaic systems, which integrate solar panels with agriculture, may reduce this risk by modifying the thermal environment farmworkers operate within, yet their impact on heat exposure remains unquantified. We evaluate wet bulb globe [...]
Sustainable Groundwater Decisions: Hydro-Economic Model Applications to Irrigation in Contrasting Environmental Conditions
Published: 2025-10-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Groundwater is important for global agriculture but increasing populations and rising food demand are placing significant pressure on its sustainable use for irrigation. Effective, financially viable irrigation management strategies are urgently needed. This study applies a farm-level hydro-economic model to two contrasting sites: the High Plains Aquifer (HPA), a deep, overexploited, unconfined [...]
Nutrition in Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenarios: analysis and prevention of malnutrition in low-income regions
Published: 2025-10-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Food Science, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Public Health
Purpose: An abrupt sunlight reduction scenario (ASRS) can be triggered by a nuclear war, a large volcanic eruption, or an asteroid strike, resulting in global agricultural collapse. A wide portfolio of resilient food interventions has been developed to address these issues, but even if they succeed in providing sufficient food energy for the global population, economic inequality could still [...]
Accessible Climate and Impact Model Output for Studying the Human and Environmental Impacts of Nuclear Conflict
Published: 2025-10-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Nuclear winter refers to the suite of physical and biological consequences that may follow nuclear conflict, particularly the cooling and darkening of Earth’s surface due to black carbon soot in the upper atmosphere. While the associated changes in temperature, precipitation, and food system productivity have been the subject of climate modeling for decades, the outputs of models used to project [...]
Climate Change Projections for the Central Peruvian Coast (2006–2100) Using CMIP5 Models: Agricultural Impacts and Implications for the Growth of Chenopodium quinoa Willd in Arid Zones
Published: 2025-10-01
Subjects: Agriculture
We evaluated climatic data for the central coastal region of Peru (Lima) as simulated by the climate models used in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). The models were: MIROC-ESM, CSIRO Mk 3.6, CNRM-CM5, GFDL-CM3, IPSL-CM5A-MR, and MPI-ESM-LR, with respective spatial resolutions of 2.81° × 1.77°, 1.875° × 1.86°, 1.4° × 1.40°, 2.5° × 2.0°, 2.5° × 1.27°, and 1.875° × 1.875°. [...]
Economic and Environmental Comparison of Open Field and Screenhouse Vegetable Farming in Nigeria
Published: 2025-09-12
Subjects: Agriculture
This study compares screenhouse, rainfed, and irrigated vegetable farming systems in Northwest Nigeria, focusing on their economic and environmental performance. Screenhouse farming demonstrates superior yield, cost-efficiency, and sustainability, producing up to 90% more saleable output than rainfed systems and using over 95% less water per kilogram of produce. Although initial investment is [...]
Strategic crop relocation could substantially mitigate nuclear winter yield losses
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science
Nuclear war could inject millions of tonnes of soot into the stratosphere, cooling the Earth and devastating crop yields. We assess crop relocation—switching which crops are grown where—as an adaptation strategy. Using the Mink crop model, we simulate six major crops under three nuclear winter scenarios (16, 47, and 150 Tg of soot). Without adaptation, global caloric production falls 23%, 53%, [...]
Amplified agricultural impacts from more frequent and intense sequential heat events
Published: 2025-09-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate
As the climate warms, interacting weather extremes such as sequential heat events pose complex risks to societies. Regarding global agriculture, laboratory experiments suggest that early crop exposure to heat may either confer tolerance or enhance vulnerability to subsequent heat during the critical crop flowering stage. We show that warm early-seasons improve crop yield potential, particularly [...]
The Largest Crop Production Shocks: Magnitude, Causes and Frequency
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Risk Analysis
Food is the foundation of our society. We often take it for granted, but stocks are rarely available for longer than a year, and food production can be disrupted by catastrophic events, both locally and globally. To highlight such major risks to the food system, we analyzed FAO crop production data from 1961 to 2023 to find the largest crop production shock for every country and identify its [...]