Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
Governing transboundary river barriers: adaptive management challenges in South and Southeast Asia
Published: 2025-08-30
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Using X-ray Fluorescence to Detect Automobile Heavy Metal Pollution in Los Angeles Soils with Copper and Palladium as Indicators
Published: 2025-08-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This project evaluates the effectiveness of using portable X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) to detect soil composition matrices that show patterns of anthropogenic influence. We explore 26 areas within Los Angeles County, California, that have various amounts of traffic; classifying each locale as Urban or Recreational. The main elements of interest are copper and palladium. These indicators are largely [...]
3D surface displacement estimation over the Groningen gas field, the Netherlands
Published: 2025-08-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geophysics and Seismology, Mining Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Since 1964, the Groningen gas field in the Netherlands has experienced significant subsidence due to gas extraction. Although InSAR has been widely used to estimate the vertical displacements of the field, capturing the full three-dimensional deformation, including omnidirectional horizontal components, remained a challenge and has only been achieved from spatially sparse GNSS observations. The [...]
Redefining Uncertainty: A Complete Bayesian Workflow for Ocean Color Remote Sensing
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences
Traditional satellite ocean color algorithms for chlorophyll-a and inherent optical property retrieval rely on deterministic regression models that typically produce single-point predictions without explicit uncertainty quantification. The absence of uncertainty awareness undermines in-situ/model match-ups, reduces predictive reliability, and ultimately erodes user confidence. In the present [...]
Two decades of land cover changes in the Colombian Andes
Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Other Earth Sciences
The Colombian Andes faces severe anthropogenic pressures from deforestation, agricultural expansion, mining, and urban development. Given its status as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspot, land cover monitoring for effective conservation strategies and sustainable development planning is essential. While early research relied on coarse or medium-resolution satellite imagery for limited [...]
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
High-resolution Digital Terrain Model and Land-surface Parameters of São Sebastião and Ilhabela, southeastern Brazil
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Effective disaster risk management and detailed environmental studies in landslide-prone regions require high-resolution and accurate Digital Terrain Models (DTMs). This work describes the development of a 2~m-resolution lidar-based DTM and an extensive set of land-surface parameters (LSPs) for the municipalities of São Sebastião and Ilhabela, southeastern Brazil. The dataset was generated from [...]
The Indispensable Role of Weather Data in Consumer Spending Prediction: A Robust Machine Learning Assessment
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology
Accurate forecasting of daily consumer spending is crucial for strategic decision-making in the retail sector, yet the dynamic influence of weather is often underestimated or insufficiently integrated into predictive models. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of incorporating both historical and 7-day weather forecast data on predicting consumer spending amounts across three diverse [...]
Exploration of Gold, Copper, Magnetite, Hematite, Manganese, Magnesium, Chromite, Antimony, Bauxite, Industrial soils, Nickel, Cobalt, Lead, Lithium minerals using Landsat8 satellite
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Environmental Education, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Geophysics and Seismology, Mineral Physics, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences
In this study, we provided an accurate and complete method for exploration and analysis of Gold, Copper, Magnetite, Hematite, Manganese, Magnesium, Chromite, Antimony, Bauxite, Industrial soils, Nickel, Cobalt, Lead and Lithium minerals in the desired area. Mineral exploration can be done using the seven bands from Landsat8 satellite images, through combination of different maps, a specific color [...]
Aquascan: Graph-Based Learning for Distributed Marine Sensing
Published: 2025-07-04
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Marine monitoring faces unprecedented challenges as climate change and human activities reshape ocean ecosystems. Traditional tracking methods struggle with the scale and complexity of modern marine sensing needs. This paper proposes distributed networks of low-cost drifting sensors and presents a comparative study of heterogeneous graph neural networks (GNNs) versus Kalman filters for predicting [...]
Satellite-based assessment of methane emissions from the Darvaza gas crater
Published: 2025-06-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane (CH₄) is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and the gas-burning Darvaza crater in Turkmenistan is a rare and persistent emitter. There are substantial uncertainties regarding the date of the crater formation (assumed to be either in 1963 or 1971), the ignition of the fire, and the relation between the fire intensity and methane release. In this study, we reconstruct the fire history [...]
Assessing the potential of the MTG-FCI geostationary mission for the detection of methane plumes
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
The Flexible Combined Imager on the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG-FCI) provides geostationary observations over Europe and Africa, the Middle East, and parts of South America, and the surrounding waters. The FCI samples the visible, near-infrared and shortwave infrared spectral windows with a spatial resolution at nadir between 500 and 1000 m, and a 10-min temporal sampling. This configuration [...]
Extrapolation Approaches for Creating Comprehensive Measurement-Based Methane Emissions Inventories
Published: 2025-06-07
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Measurement-based methane emissions inventories are essential for U.S. oil and natural gas operators to track their progress toward emissions targets, demonstrate the impact of improved operational and monitoring practices, and enable the scientific community to monitor methane budgets at various scales. However, translating raw emission measurement data, whether from continuous monitoring [...]
High-Resolution Methane Detection with the GHGSat Constellation
Published: 2025-05-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Monitoring
GHGSat operates a constellation of small satellites designed to detect and quantify methane emissions with high sensitivity compared with existing satellite technologies. An important feature of GHGSat measurements is the high spatial resolution (~25m), which enables attribution of emissions to specific facilities and subsequent corrective action from the operator. The GHGSat constellation [...]
Mapping the health harm of Bangladeshi brick kilns
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring
Bangladesh suffers from poor air quality, with brick kilns as major contributors that remain difficult to regulate. We combine remotely-sensed data, machine learning, and air-quality models to locate 9,187 clay brick kilns (2014–2024), estimating their technology, activity status, and health effects. Active kilns peaked in 2019 and have since declined by 4% annually. Kiln emissions cause [...]