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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring

From natural variability to flow homogenisation: how dams, water diversions, and climate change reduced seasonal flows in Australia’s Murrumbidgee River

Jan Philipp Kreibich, Will Glamore, Hongxing Zheng, et al.

Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

River regulation and climate change have profoundly altered seasonal flow dynamics globally, with cascading ecological impacts on freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity. Magnitude and timing are key components of the flow regime, connecting rivers with floodplains and driving feeding and breeding cues for aquatic organisms. We investigated the separate and combined effects of water resource [...]

Enhancing and Interpreting Deep Learning for Sea Ice Charting using the AutoICE Benchmark

Sepideh Jalayer, Samira Alkaee Taleghan, Rafael Pires de Lima, et al.

Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography

Accurate mapping of sea ice is crucial for marine navigation and monitoring climate change. Automating sea ice mapping remains challenging due to remotely-sensed signal ambiguity, the dynamic nature of sea ice, and limited field measurements. The AutoICE challenge recently introduced a benchmark to advance deep learning for sea ice mapping. Top-performing solutions used the U-Net architecture [...]

Impact of GHG mitigation measures in sanitation service chains: focusing on septic tanks and sewers

Jakpong Moonkawin, Mariane Schneider, Shigeo Fujii, et al.

Published: 2025-03-26
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Sustainability

Sanitation service chains (SSC) in many cities in low- and middle-income countries are complex and comprise poorly managed on-site and centralized technologies that emit greenhouse gases (GHG). In this study, we aimed to estimate the impact of GHG mitigation measures along SSCs and account for the interdependencies of SSC components with respect to GHG emissions. Using an SSC in Hanoi, we [...]

Enhancing the Normalized Difference Water Index for Improved Urban Flood Detection

Abdulrhman Almoadi

Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Other Earth Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

Accurate urban flood detection is crucial for effective disaster management and urban planning. Traditional indices like the Normalized Difference Water Index and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index often produce inaccurate results due to spectral confusion in urban areas and sensitivity to shadows. Moreover, MNDWI's reliance on the Shortwave Infrared band limits its use with certain [...]

Mercury budget in global rivers at present-day: impacts from reservoirs and dams

Dong Peng, Zeli Tan, Peipei Wu, et al.

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management

Many world rivers are currently polluted by mercury (Hg) compounds, leading to the bioaccumulation of methylmercury (MeHg) in the food web, which poses potential health risks to humans. However, the riverine Hg budgets of global scale remain poorly understood due to limited observations, complicating efficient environmental governance. Here, we employ a process-driven Hg model to track its [...]

Modern Cave Monitoring Informs Interpretations of Past Climate Change: Applications to Titan Cave, Wyoming

Bryce Kenneth Belanger, Cameron B. de Wet, Bryan L. McKenzie, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Speleology

Monitoring of cave environments is an essential process for deciphering records of past climate change preserved in the geochemical composition of speleothems, or mineral cave deposits. This study presents data from a multi-year monitoring effort in Titan Cave, Wyoming, a site of interest due to the abundance of speleothems suitable for paleoclimate reconstruction. Titan Cave exhibits annual cave [...]

Freshwater salinization of seasonal ponds: High salinity and stratification threaten critical, overlooked habitats

Steven Brady, Gaboury Benoit

Published: 2025-02-20
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Water Resource Management

Nearly a century of road salt use in the snowbelt region of North America has led to substantial increases in salinity levels in freshwater habitats (1, 2). Salt pollution in lakes and rivers is well characterized (3, 4). Lacking are broad insights for seasonal ponds. As critical habitats for many endemic species, these small and often poorly flushed surface waters are especially vulnerable to [...]

PoMELO Passive Blind Test Results: Emissions detection and quantification

Thomas Barchyn, Michelle Clements, Tyler Gough, et al.

Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

PoMELO Passive is a technology that combines vehicle-based pollution measurements from public roads with cloud-based software to: (i) detect emissions from oil and gas sites, and (ii) quantify emissions rates. Automated attribution and plume modeling algorithms provide results with little human intervention, facilitating large scale monitoring programs. PoMELO Passive is operationally deployed at [...]

Philadelphia and the Schuylkill under extreme hydrometeorological events

Dingyu Xuan, M. Ani Hsieh, Douglas J Jerolmack, et al.

Published: 2025-02-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology

The Schuylkill River, a lifeline for Philadelphia, faces intensifying stress from urbanization and increasingly severe extreme hydrometeorological events (EHMEs) driven by climate change. Understanding how urban estuarine rivers respond to EHMEs remains challenging due to limited high-resolution data and the complexness of human-modified landscapes. Here, we combine long-term hydrological [...]

Predicting Land Surface Temperature With Uncertainty Estimation Using a Community Sensor Network and Machine Learning

Tom Narock, Anna Kulikova, Sakib Hussen, et al.

Published: 2025-01-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Sustainability

Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) are areas in cities that experience higher temperatures than surrounding areas due to construction features such as buildings, roads, and a general lack of vegetation. UHIs, which pose a threat to public health while also increasing energy usage, are often defined using land surface temperatures. Our study demonstrates how a community sensor network from the Baltimore [...]

Diverging trends in nitrate and phosphorus loads and yields across Illinois watersheds, 1997–2022

Brock Jacob Watson Kamrath, Jennifer C Murphy, Hannah L Podzorski, et al.

Published: 2025-01-08
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management

Illinois is a major contributor of nutrients to the northern Gulf of Mexico. As such, the State of Illinois initiated efforts to curb nutrient runoff over the last several decades. To evaluate progress towards these reductions, water-quality data were used to estimate incremental loads and yields of nitrate plus nitrite (NO3) and total phosphorus (TP) from 1997–2022 for 49 Illinois watersheds, [...]

Sea level rise submergence simulations suggest substantial deterioration of Indian River Lagoon ecosystem services by 2050, Florida, U.S.A.

Randall W. Parkinson, Levente Juhász, Shimon Wdowinski, et al.

Published: 2025-01-02
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management

The Indian River Lagoon is a 250-km-long Estuary of National Significance located along the east-central Florida coast of the USA. NOAA tidal data generated at a station located in the central reaches of the estuary indicate sea level rise has accelerated over the duration of record to an average of 9.6 ± 1.6 mm year−1 (2003–2022). It is expected to continue accelerating over the duration of this [...]

Site Planning for a Network of Government-operated Weather Stations in the Dominican Republic Using Zonal Statistics from Geospatial Sources, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making, and Neighborhood Analysis

Jose Ramon Martinez Batlle, Michela Izzo Gioiosa

Published: 2024-12-30
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science

Many weather station networks lack sufficient representativeness, and their station density is often inadequate to capture spatial and climatic variability effectively. Optimal site selection is therefore essential to enhance spatial coverage and improve data quality. This study proposes a methodology for identifying optimal sites for a meteorological station network in the Dominican Republic, [...]

Beyond land surface temperature: identifying areas of daytime thermal discomfort in cities by combining remote sensing and field measurements.

Julie C Fahy, Christoph Bachofen, Reto Camponovo, et al.

Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability

Satellite images of land surface temperatures (LST) are commonly used to identify areas within cities most prone to diurnal thermal discomfort, but they may not reflect the experiences of pedestrians. Here, we developed predictive statistical models for Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET), an indicator of thermal discomfort, with easily accessible spatial predictors. For this, we measured [...]

Projecting Global Changes in Land Use and Ecosystem Services Using SEALS (Spatial Economic Allocation Landscape Simulator)

Justin Andrew Johnson, Sumil Thakrar

Published: 2024-12-18
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Spatial Science, Statistical Models

Understanding how economic systems and ecosystems interact across space is crucial to ensure societal needs are met without compromising environmental quality. Spatially explicit economic models usually describe human activities and ensuing land-use dynamics at a resolution that this is too coarse (typically 10-1000 regions) to understand how these affect many biophysical processes, including [...]

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