Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
SCI-DEM: A Method for Generating Digital Beach Surfaces from Tide and Waterline Timeseries
Published: 2026-10-27
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Oceanography
We present SCI-DEM, a method for deriving Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of intertidal beach surfaces, profiles and beach widths from time-series waterlines using low-cost coastal CCTV cameras and modelled water levels. SCI-DEM builds on two established components: a waterline extraction method built on a semantic segmentation model, and a camera-pose-estimated homography, used to georeference [...]
A global life-cycle inventory database of deforestation area and emissions for agricultural products
Published: 2026-10-26
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Food Science, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Sustainability
Food-system actors are increasingly required to quantify and report the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture-driven deforestation in their supply chains, yet comprehensive, up-to-date and openly accessible data to support such Scope 3 reporting remain scarce. Here we present a harmonized life-cycle inventory (LCI) database of deforestation area and carbon footprints covering 183 agricultural [...]
Does electricity scaling improve annual water-withdrawal estimates? Evidence from US Meta data centers
Published: 2026-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Studies, Water Resource Management
Planners often need to estimate data-center water use before detailed operating data exist, and a common shortcut multiplies electricity use by a historical water intensity. The logic is appealing: computing produces heat, and removing heat often takes water. Yet whether this shortcut beats the simplest alternative, persistence (assuming that each facility withdraws what it withdrew the year [...]
Satellite-Based CO and NOx Emission Estimates from South-Central Chilean Plantation Fires
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present top-down CO and NOx emission estimates for a south-central Chilean fire from Sentinel-5P/TROPOMI observations. Applying the Cross-Sectional Flux method to CO and the Exponentially Modified Gaussian method to NO2, with uncertainty propagated through 500-member Monte Carlo ensembles, we retrieve a median CO flux of 1,273 kg s⁻¹ (95% CI: 676–1,843 kg s⁻¹) and a median NOx flux of 7,505 g [...]
Ecological compression of vegetation information in wildfire spread prediction: a case study of the 2020 Brattain Fire
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Broad fuel categories simplify mapped vegetation, but it is unclear whether the distinctions removed help predict wildfire spread. We examined whether vegetation composition improved prediction of the next observed fire-growth interval and measured the information lost by grouping fuel models. Using the 2020 Brattain Fire in Oregon, we compared baseline predictors describing fire state, terrain, [...]
GROW-Qual: A global observational groundwater quality dataset linked to water table dynamics and Earth system variables
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Groundwater underpins freshwater supply, food production and ecosystem health across the globe. Yet, groundwater levels and quality are increasingly threatened by overextraction, contamination, and climate change. Understanding how water table dynamics and quality are interlinked and affected by these pressures requires integrated observational groundwater datasets combined with Earth system [...]
Monitoring Carbon Hotspots in Patchy Landscapes from Sparse Lidar and Dense Satellite Time Series
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Monitoring aboveground biomass (AGB) stocks as an indicator of carbon storage is essential for climate mitigation, adaptation, and land management. Across much of Earth’s land surface, carbon stocks are concentrated in fine-scale hotspots, including isolated trees in pastures, shrub patches in tundra, and riparian vegetation in drylands. These carbon hotspots are vulnerable to change but are [...]
Fingerprinting PFAS pollution in European surface waters
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) comprise a large group of synthetic chemical substances used across industries and find application in a diverse range of consumer products. Owing to their ubiquitous use and ongoing emissions, such substances are distributed throughout the environment. PFAS and their metabolites pose considerable risk to environmental and human health due to their high [...]
Wave-Driven Sliding, Ratcheting, and Overturning of Coral Transplant Units: An Idealized Nonsmooth Contact Model
Published: 2026-10-11
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Marine Biology, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oceanography, Systems Biology
Coral transplantation attaches fragments to a structure placed on the seabed, and that structure must stay put long enough for the fragments to fuse to it. We examine that requirement with an idealized model in which a transplant unit is a planar rigid body on a rigid bed under two unilateral frictional contacts, loaded through a Morison description of near-bed wave kinematics and integrated by a [...]
Workflow for estimating above ground biomass from satellite imagery with non-geolocated ground validation data
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation
Satellite-based aboveground biomass mapping typically relies on validation data from field-based inventory plots or other high resolution ground truthing, but acquiring validation data is challenging. In the United States, the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program is a common source of field validation data for biomass mapping, but currently the US Forest Service is not processing Material [...]
Fixed-ground multisensor monitoring resolves longitudinal vegetation condition and fuel-state structure in Southern California chaparral and oak scenes
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Wildfire-relevant vegetation and fuel conditions evolve through interacting changes in vegetation condition, three-dimensional fuel structure, thermal response, and atmospheric drying, yet these dimensions are commonly monitored separately. This study evaluated repeated fixed-ground multisensor monitoring at two fixed vegetation scenes in Placerita Canyon, California. Multispectral imaging, [...]
Forecasting the moisture content of live forest fuels with a transformer machine learning model and Sentinel-2 satellite data
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Hydrology, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Live fuel moisture content (LFMC) provides an indicator of vegetation flammability, the potential for canopy dieback from drought, and habitat quality for arboreal fauna. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have increased the potential in meteorological forecasts for Earth surface forecasting. Combining weather forecasts with remotely sensed LFMC offers a promising avenue for short and [...]
Model-Based Assessment of Geogenic Radon Exposure in Chaco Canyon and Adjacent Ancestral Puebloan Residential Settings
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Geochemistry, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Paleontology, Sustainability
Naturally occurring radon-222 and its short-lived alpha-emitting progeny are important sources of environmental radioactivity in enclosed, earth-contact spaces, yet their potential relevance to archaeological built environments has rarely been quantified. Here we evaluate chronic radon exposure in Chaco Canyon, where Ancestral Pueblo people occupied earth-contact and semi-subterranean rooms [...]
Coupled Physics-Based and Machine Learning Streamflow Modeling with High-Resolution Flood Inundation and Impact Assessment for Hurricane Florence (2018): A Case Study of the Neuse River at Goldsboro, North Carolina
Published: 2026-09-18
Subjects: Computer Engineering, Earth Sciences, Education, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Planetary Hydrology, Probability
Hurricane Florence made landfall in North Carolina in September 2018 and produced record or near-record river stages across the Neuse River basin, including at United States Geological Survey (USGS) gauge 02089000 near Goldsboro. This study presents an end-to-end hydrological and floodmapping workflow that couples a semi-distributed, physics-based rainfall-runoff model (Physics V3.5) and a [...]
Recent armed conflict disrupts atmospheric climate monitoring
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The unprecedented use of GPS jamming in the Russo-Ukrainian war severely disrupts GNSS Radio Occultation, a key remote sensing technique for climate monitoring and weather forecasting. Since 2018, a growing systematic gap in atmospheric observations has extended far beyond the direct conflict zone. This loss of data substantially impairs atmospheric temperature monitoring, introducing observation [...]