Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
GEM-15: Global surface and terrain elevation models (15 meters) from sub-meter optical stereo imagery
Published: 2026-11-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Existing open global digital elevation models (DEMs) are limited to 30 m resolution, blur fine-scale urban and canopy structure, and rely on satellite missions flown between 2000 and 2015. We present Google's Global Elevation Models at 15 m (GEM-15), to our knowledge the first openly available near-global multi-layer elevation dataset at 15 m grid spacing. GEM-15 aggregates native 0.5 m optical [...]
Satellite data for the integrated modelling of Watershed-Coast System morphodynamics in a changing climate: a critical review and a structured framework
Published: 2026-11-09
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Oceanography, Water Resource Management
Watershed-Coast Systems (WACS) integrate the watershed and the coast as a coupled geomorphological entity whose evolution depends on climate, terrestrial, and marine drivers acting at very different scales. Modelling the morphodynamics of WACS in a changing climate is a recognised but uneven endeavour: satellite-data use has matured for inland hydrology and for coastal observation taken in [...]
Do typhoons pull Indonesian smoke into the Pacific? A pre-registered test, and the record 2026 season
Published: 2026-11-08
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology
In August to October 2026, during an El Niño with the highest Oceanic Niño Index for those months since 1950 (+2.46 °C), smoke from Indonesian fires spread over the western North Pacific while an active typhoon season was under way. Since 2012, typhoons have been described as drawing Maritime Continent smoke into the monsoon flow and out over the ocean, but this rests on case studies and field [...]
What lies beneath: National aboveground carbon stock changes and under-canopy disturbance detection from 3D point clouds
Published: 2026-11-07
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Geography, Remote Sensing
Accurate and spatially explicit quantification of forest biomass and carbon stock changes over time is necessary for carbon accounting and verification at different scales. Here, we applied deep learning to full 3D point-cloud data to produce a high-resolution time series of forest attribute maps for Denmark. The maps include predictions for biomass and canopy height with estimated uncertainties, [...]
Hearing the heat: a proof-of-concept study of nonlinear sound measures for distinguishing phases of rapid organic decomposition
Published: 2026-11-07
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Dynamic Systems, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Non-linear Dynamics, Physical and Environmental Geography, Soil Science
Acoustic recording can follow decomposition non-destructively, but which acoustic measures carry process information is largely untested. In a proof-of-concept experiment, four nonlinear complexity measures and six conventional ecoacoustic indices were compared in eight octave bands, using 150 recordings from five buckets of one vermicompost-hay batch during one mesophilic heating-cooling cycle. [...]
Greener but not taller: LiDAR shows South Asia's forest greening is concentrated in structurally depleted forest
Published: 2026-11-06
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Geography, Natural Resources and Conservation, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
India and China lead the world in greening, and forest greening is widely read as a sign of recovery. Greenness, however, tracks foliage and says little about forest type or height. MODIS greening trends for 2001 to 2024 and a new 10 m map separating natural forest from plantations and tree crops showed that natural forest supplied 65% of South Asia's woody greening. Against least-disturbed [...]
A National Screening Framework for Critical Mineral Potential and Heavy Metal Hazard in U.S. Mine Waste
Published: 2026-11-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Natural Resource Economics, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Earth Sciences
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Mine Waste Inventory (NMWI) Version 2.0 provides the first comprehensive national database of mine-waste features across the United States, but it does not directly evaluate their critical-mineral potential or environmental hazard. We linked 1,498 tailings, waste-rock, leach, and slag features at 343 sites to nearby public geochemical observations from [...]
Multi-temporal Canopy Height Modeling using Deep Learning and Sentinel-2: The Influence of Training Data and Input Feature Representations
Published: 2026-11-05
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geography, Remote Sensing
Precise information on canopy height is crucial to assess biomass and climate-induced structural changes within forests. Canopy height maps derived from optical satellite data can provide valuable wall-to-wall information, but often remain subject to substantial uncertainties. In this study, we systematically investigate the influence of training data and Sentinel-2 feature representations on the [...]
One island, three countries: aquaculture ponds explain the cross-border gap in mangrove loss on Borneo
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Remote Sensing, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Borneo's mangroves share one coastline, climate and sediment regime, yet they are governed by three countries. Using the annual Global Mangrove Watch v4.1 series and open data, this study asks why mangrove in Indonesian Kalimantan is lost faster than in Malaysian Borneo and Brunei, and tests three explanations: protected-area performance, conversion pathways and El Niño sea-level fall. Between [...]
Station-trained air-quality forecasts without regional emission inventories
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Computer Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Air-quality forecasts rely on regional chemical transport models (CTMs) and emission inventories, which are uncertain in many regions and costly to update. Here we present SOLACE, whose inner forecast is trained on monitoring-station observations alone and evolves gridded concentration fields through explicit transport, layer exchange, sources and sinks. With 140,000 trained parameters and no [...]
Mapping landslide change and volume with repeat airborne LiDAR after the May 2023 Emilia-Romagna event: slope-dependent detection limits and lowered areas
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Remote Sensing
Landslide inventories are validated against repeat topography by comparing the ground that changes beyond a detection limit inside mapped polygons with the same fraction on stable ground. Stable ground is gentler than landslides, and LiDAR noise grows with slope. We measure the consequence for the May 2023 Emilia-Romagna event, Italy, with four pairs of 0.5 m airborne LiDAR on 919 river-corridor [...]
Threshold Sensitivity and Reference Uncertainty in Sentinel-1 Inundation Mapping: The July 2021 Mahad Flood
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is widely used to map flood inundation under cloud cover, but backscatter-based mapping is sensitive to processing choices, and quantitative evaluation depends on reference data that are often unavailable. This paper examines both issues for the July 2021 flood at Mahad, Maharashtra, India. Three Sentinel-1A VV/VH scenes from one descending orbit, acquired on 10 [...]
Climate Risk Intelligence Index (CRII): An AI-Augmented Satellite-Based Climate Vulnerability Assessment Framework for India
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring
Climate change has emerged as a major global challenge affecting environmental sustainability, hydrological stability, urban resilience, and ecosystem health. Conventional climate vulnerability assessment systems primarily rely on static rule-based frameworks and isolated environmental indicators, limiting contextual interpretability and adaptive reasoning across geographically diverse regions. [...]
Historical air quality database in Navarre, Spain (2011–2025): Harmonized hourly records and relational Star Schema of atmospheric pollutants
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Monitoring
Administrative air quality monitoring networks often release public data across fragmented repositories, variable formats, and inconsistent time encodings, hindering automated scientific re-use. This paper presents a curated, harmonized, and quality-controlled environmental dataset covering 15 consecutive years (2011–2025) of hourly atmospheric observations in Navarre, Spain. Integrating [...]
Conditional Benefits of Point-Level UAV LiDAR--Multispectral Fusion for 3D Vegetation Classification
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Engineering, Environmental Monitoring
Multisensor remote-sensing fusion combines complementary measurements of landscape structure and surface reflectance, but adding a second modality does not necessarily produce uniform classification gains. This study evaluates point-level data fusion of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) LiDAR and multispectral imagery within a three-dimensional (3D) point-cloud representation. Tree--shrub [...]