Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
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 [...]
BORDER OPTICS : Satellite Verification of India's Vibrant Villages Programme: A Compositing-Window Robustness Assessment of Border-Village Development
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ask the Government of India if things have worked out for them with their flagship scheme for the Border Villages, the honest answer (on parliamentary record) is No, it has never been verified anywhere. The Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP-I) has approved around ₹4,800 crore in support of 2,967 villages in five Himalayan border states/union territories including 662 villages marked 'priority' for [...]
The Vulnerability Spiral: Compound Climate Risk Across Five Islands
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Hydrology, International and Area Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Sustainability
sea level rise stacked on top of degrading natural coastal defenses. That assumption is rarely tested againstindependent, multi temporal evidence, and rarely broken down by ecosystem type, so I tested it directly,across 5 islands spanning 3 ocean basins (Maldives, Lakshadweep, [...]
Evaluating forecast baselines and network representativeness for daily PM2.5 in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology
An order-fair attribution of daily PM2.5 predictability in the Kathmandu Valley assigns 72% of achievable error reduction to persistence, 19% to meteorology and 9% to day-of-year climatology, with the latter two largely redundant; no fitted model, including random forests and gradient boosting tuned by nested chronological cross-validation, outperforms an unfitted lag-1 forecast (11.22 µg m-3). [...]
Investigation of Drivers and Sources of Potential Harmful Algal Blooms in Lake Anna, Virginia, 2023–24
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Algal blooms in freshwater reservoirs are an increasing concern because of the risk to aquatic ecosystem health, recreational use, and water quality. Among the taxa that comprise an algal bloom, cyanobacteria are of particular concern due to the potential to produce toxic compounds which can cause acute and chronic illness in humans if ingested through contaminated water or shellfish. When toxins [...]
The Bhote Koshi–Trishuli flash flood of 26 August 2026, Rasuwa, Nepal: warning latency exceeded flood travel time
Published: 2026-08-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology
An ice-rock mass detached from the northern flank of the Langtang massif, Nepal, at 08:37:10 Nepal Time on 26 August 2026. It blocked the Lhende Khola and released a cascade that killed more than 500 people along the Bhote Koshi-Trishuli-Narayani corridor. This study measures the warning chain end to end, timing the front at six stations from ten-minute stage series recovered from the river-watch [...]
Data Test of a Hydro-Kinematic State Graph for Landslide Forecasting
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Statistics and Probability
A graph model can make landslide-monitoring relationships explicit, but a graph is not automatically more informative than a well-regularized time-series model. This study tests that distinction on the publicly released Lamosano landslide record from northeastern Italy. The processed dataset contains 161 observations of 11-day horizontal InSAR differential displacement and rainfall from 10 April [...]
The limits of ecological decodability of a geospatial foundation-model embedding: a registered evaluation of AlphaEarth over shallow Great Barrier Reef habitats
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Annual satellite embedding fields compress a year of multi-sensor observation into one vector per 10 m pixel, worldwide. We test what ecological information the AlphaEarth embedding holds about shallow (< 10 m) Great Barrier Reef habitats, and where its limits lie. Every candidate output was registered with a pass gate before testing, evaluated under one fixed protocol, and reported pass or [...]
Spatial Recognition Justice: Integrating Participatory Mapping and Discrete Choice Experiment to Elicit Ecosystem Service Values
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Spatial Science
Nature-based solutions (NBS) have become a central component of climate adaptation and sustainability agendas in many cities. Yet NBS implementation increasingly faces opposition from residents. As NBS fail to consider diverse needs, values, and priorities of different population segments, they fall short from a recognition justice perspective. This study provides a systematic assessment of [...]
Comparing UNet and HRNet for Geomorphic Feature Extraction from Digital Terrain Model-Derived Land Surface Parameters
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Remote Sensing
Automated extraction of geomorphic features from high spatial resolution terrain data is important for environmental monitoring, geohazard assessment, and landscape change analysis. This study compares two convolutional neural network architectures, UNet and High-Resolution Network (HRNet), for semantic segmentation of mine benches and sinkholes from lidar-derived digital terrain models and land [...]
Flooded Rivers, Drying Wetlands, Vanishing Tributaries: Hydrological Paradox of the East Ganga Plains
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The East Ganga Plains (EGP) present a striking hydrological paradox: while embanked rivers flood with increasing magnitude, adjacent wetlands and groundwater-fed streams are desiccating, and aquifer storage is declining. Using satellite remote sensing and gravimetry, we document that: (i) wetlands exhibit significant water-cover loss despite stable monsoon rainfall; (ii) small rivers and [...]
PyRiverShift: A Gaussian Transect Decomposition Framework for Quantifying Sub-Pixel Lateral Channel Mobility
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Along many rivers, lateral channel mobility is a key process, yet quantification from freely available multi-decadal 30 m Landsat imagery is constrained by low pixel resolution relative to channel width. We introduce PyRiverShift, a sensor-agnostic spectral decomposition framework. PyRiverShift fits a 1-D Gaussian to NDWI profiles along valley-perpendicular transects, recovering sub-pixel channel [...]