Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Agriculture
Cloud Cover and Structural Observation Gaps in African Agricultural Earth Observation: Evidence from Six Agroecological Zones
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Optical Earth observation underpins a growing number of agricultural-monitoring and agri-fintech services across Africa, all of which need a usable view of a field often enough to track its condition. Cloud gaps in that record are usually treated as random missing data; we test whether they are instead structurally biased. Using three growing seasons (2022–2024) of Sentinel-2 scene-classification [...]
Testing the Fluorescence Advantage: Solar-Induced Fluorescence as an Early Indicator of Agricultural Drought Stress in Marathwada, Maharashtra
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Drought detection in India, both for official declaration purposes and for triggering payouts under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) crop-insurance scheme, still leans heavily on rainfall-deficit records and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) — two signals that only move once a crop has already begun to visibly suffer. This study asks whether Solar-Induced Fluorescence [...]
Stolen Strata: Quantifying the Anthropogenic Erasure of Kashmir's Karewa Terraces and Its Threat to the Saffron Economy
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Karewa terraces are elevated, flat-topped deposits of intermontane lake-basin age (Pleistocene/Pliocene), and they underlie one of Kashmir's most economically significant agricultural systems — the saffron-growing belt at Pampore. Everyone who follows agriculture in Kashmir already knows these terraces are vanishing under unregulated soil mining and uncontrolled urban expansion; there's ample [...]
The Cotton Line: Testing the Institutional Persistence of an Erased Colonial Land-Tenure Boundary Across Vidarbha's Agrarian and Vegetation Geography
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, International and Area Studies, Statistics and Probability
Are there 150-year-old institutional legacies measurable in the 21st century as a spatial signature, in patterns of vegetation phenology (cotton signatures), agrarian labor structure, land use and land surface temperature? That is the core question this paper addresses and the design is not a 'before'-'after', it's a 'spatial discontinuity' test to see if there is still a measurable gap across an [...]
Integrated soil profile mapping reveals regional patterns of soil condition across Southern African agricultural lands
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Statistics, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Statistical Models
Soil information at regional scales remains limited in Africa despite its importance for sustainable agricultural management, food security and land degradation assessment. Existing digital soil mapping approaches commonly model soil properties as independent depth layers and apply depth harmonisation after prediction, limiting their capacity to characterise changes in soil condition. Here, we [...]
ECMWF SEAS5 Seasonal Precipitation Outlook and Hydrological-Hydrogeological Assessment for the Middle East: August 2026-January 2027
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Higher Education, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Risk Analysis
This preprint presents a regional hydrological and hydrogeological interpretation of the ECMWF SEAS5 System 51 ensemble-mean precipitation forecast initialized on 1 August 2026 for the Middle East and adjacent portions of the analysis domain. The supplied NetCDF field is time-mean total precipitation rate (tprate; m s^-1), converted to monthly precipitation depth (mm/month) using the actual [...]
A novel integrated assessment framework to inform Australia's net zero transition
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Australia has set an ambitious goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Attaining this target will require important transformations across multiple sectors of the economy. Integrated assessment models can provide valuable insights into the interactions across sectors of the economy, including land, agriculture and energy, to guide these complex transformations. However, many [...]
Village-Scale Mapping of Agricultural Systems and Intensification Levels in Benin Using Geospatial Data and Machine Learning
Published: 2026-08-01
Subjects: Agriculture
Agricultural systems are rapidly transforming, making regular mapping critical for policy guidance. Field-based surveys remain costly and spatially limited, while satellite data represent a promising avenue for characterising agricultural systems. This study explores the use of freely available satellite and geospatial data to produce an exhaustive village-scale mapping of agricultural systems [...]
Soil acidity governs cropland phosphorus availability under future climate
Published: 2026-07-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Biogeochemistry, Soil Science
Understanding the response of agricultural phosphorus (P) cycling to climate change is fundamental for ensuring global food security and protecting planetary boundaries1–2. Recently, Wang et al.3 reported a drastic reduction in soil P bioavailability (32–34%) under long-term elevated carbon dioxide (eCO2) and warming in rice paddies, attributing it to enhanced geochemical sequestration via [...]
The role of neglected and underutilised crops in food and nutrition security under climate change: Insights from South Africa
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Agriculture
Neglected and underutilised crop species (NUS) are increasingly discussed as options to enhance the resilience, diversity and nutritional quality of food systems under climate change. However, their productivity and nutritional contribution remain insufficiently quantified at larger scales, making it unclear to what extent they can contribute to food and nutrition outcomes. In South Africa, we [...]
The fossil-water debt of agricultural exports: satellite gravimetry and a climate–yield re-coupling index, demonstrated for Tunisian dates
Published: 2026-07-08
Subjects: Agriculture, Food Science
Fossil groundwater — recharging on geological, not human, timescales — irrigates a growing share of the world's agricultural exports. Drawing it down is capital consumption, not income, yet the depletion embedded in the traded crop is priced nowhere, because the extraction driving it is largely unrecorded. We present a satellite-supported, commodity-level accounting framework that quantifies this [...]
From linguistic evaluation to mechanistic verification: testing LLM-generated farm recommendations
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biogeochemistry, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability
Large language models (LLM) are increasingly used to generate farm-management advice, but their biophysical consequences remain largely unverified. We introduce a process-based verification framework that combines management portfolios generated by ChatGPT and Claude with the process-based model LandscapeDNDC across 11 contrasting agroecosystems. The LLMs produced agronomically plausible [...]
Geospatial Assessment of Current and Future Land Suitability for Peruvian Amylaceous Maize (Zea mays L.) Using Random Forest Modeling
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Agriculture
Climate change poses an increasing threat to crop suitability and food security, particularly for varieties of great cultural and economic importance, such as Peruvian starchy maize (Zea mays L.), whose optimal growing areas remain poorly characterized at the national level. This study presents the first comprehensive geospatial assessment of current and future land suitability for starchy corn [...]
Impacts of Potential Solar Radiation Modification: Systematic Review Reveals Challenges and Opportunities
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences
Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a proposed temporary intervention to limit global warming while mitigation efforts continue. Understanding its potential consequences for human and natural systems is essential for informed deliberations. We conducted a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature on SRM impacts published through May 2024, identifying 289 studies, including 261 primary [...]
Prioritizing Agricultural Flood Mitigation: A GeoAI-Driven Assessment of Susceptibility, Crop Exposure, and Socioeconomic Vulnerability
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Life Sciences
Flooding is a recurrent hazard across the U.S. Midwest, yet frameworks integrating flood hazard, agricultural exposure, and socioeconomic vulnerability at the county scale remain limited. This study presents a GeoAI-driven agricultural flood risk assessment for all 99 counties in Iowa, combining machine learning-derived flood susceptibility with crop-specific economic exposure and socioeconomic [...]