Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
Towards underwater plastic monitoring using echo sounding
Published: 2021-01-25
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology
Plastics originating from land are mainly transported to the oceans by rivers. The total plastic transport from land to seas remains uncertain because of difficulties in measuring and the lack of standard observation techniques. A large focus in observations is on plastics floating on the water surface. However, an increasing number of observations suggest that large quantities of plastics are [...]
Plastic plants: Water hyacinths as driver of plastic transport in tropical rivers
Published: 2021-01-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Recent studies suggest that water hyacinths play an important role in the transport of macroplastics in freshwater ecosystems. Forming large patches of several meters at the water surface, water hyacinths tend to entrain and aggregate large amounts of floating debris, including plastic items. Research on this topic is still novel and few studies have quantified the role of the water hyacinths in [...]
Temporal monitoring of vast sand mining in NW Turkey: Implications on environmental/social impacts
Published: 2021-01-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sedimentology
Loose sand has a wide variety (over 200) of industrial usage where most of the sand is used in infrastructure. Due to its low cost / high benefit nature and international high demand, worldwide examples of excessive sand mining caused complete destruction of habitats and forcing natives change living practices or even to migrate. Sand mining is one of the most controversial and rapidly growing [...]
NIRvP: a robust structural proxy for sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence and photosynthesis across scales
Published: 2020-12-31
Subjects: Agriculture, Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Plant Sciences
Sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) is a promising new tool for remotely estimating photosynthesis. However, the degree to which incoming sunlight and the structure of the canopy rather than leaf physiology contribute to SIF variations is still not well characterized. Here we demonstrate that the canopy structure-related near-infrared reflectance of vegetation multiplied by incoming [...]
An Active Learning Pipeline to Detect Hurricane Washover in Post-Storm Aerial Images
Published: 2020-12-02
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present an active learning pipeline to identify hurricane impacts on coastal landscapes. Previously unlabeled post-storm images are used in a three component workflow — first an online interface is used to crowd-source labels for imagery; second, a convolutional neural network is trained using the labeled images; third, model predictions are displayed on an interactive map. Both the labeler [...]
Urban Air Quality Modeling Using Low-Cost Sensor Network and Data Assimilation in the Aburra Valley, Colombia
Published: 2020-10-29
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring
The use of low air quality networks has been increasing in recent years to study urban pollution dynamics. Here we show the evaluation of the operational Aburra Valley's low-cost network against the official monitoring network. The results show that the PM2.5 low-cost measurements are very close to those observed by the official network. Additionally, the low-cost allows a higher spatial [...]
Spatial Disaggregation of Particulate Matter Emission Inventory in the Metropolitan Area of Aburr\'a Valley for Air Quality Modelling
Published: 2020-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Other Environmental Sciences
In this paper a local emission inventory for PM10 and PM2.5 is presented that has been developed using a top-down spatial disaggregation of the official emission inventory for the Metropolitan Area of the Aburra Valley in Colombia. The local emission inventory was evaluated using the LOTOS-EUROS Chemical Transport Model in a high-resolution simulation, and compared with the global emission [...]
Structure-from-Motion on shallow reefs and beaches: potential and limitations of consumer-grade drones to reconstruct topography and bathymetry
Published: 2020-10-21
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Studies, Fluid Dynamics, Fresh Water Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Remote Sensing
Reconstructing the topography of shallow underwater environments using Structure-from-Motion – Multi View Stereo (SfM-MVS) techniques applied to aerial imagery from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a challenging problem, as it involves non-linear distortions caused by water refraction. This study presents an experiment with aerial photographs collected with a consumer-grade UAV on the [...]
A machine learning approach for prioritizing groundwater testing for per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)
Published: 2020-10-19
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Risk Analysis, Water Resource Management
Regulatory agencies are beginning to recognize and regulate per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) as concerning environmental contaminants. In groundwater management, testing and mitigation strategies are desirable, but can be time and cost-intensive processes. As a result, only a fraction of all groundwater wells has been tested for PFAS levels, resulting in potentially extended drinking [...]
A continental-scale assessment of density, size, distribution, and historical trends of Australian farm dams
Published: 2020-09-01
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Australia is the second driest continent on Earth and freshwater is, therefore, a critical policy concern. Farm dams are ubiquitous and drive AU$17.7 billion of agricultural value, yet there has never been a formal census of Australian dams. In this study, we present a continental-scale assessment on density, distribution, and historical trends of farm dams in each State and Territory of [...]
What does the NDVI really tell us about crops? Insight from proximal spectral field sensors
Published: 2020-09-01
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The use of remote sensing in agriculture is expanding due to innovation in sensors and platforms. Drones, high resolution instruments on CubeSats, and robot mounted proximal phenotyping sensors all feature in this drive. Common threads include a focus on high spatial and spectral resolution coupled with the use of machine learning methods for relating observations to crop parameters. As the [...]
Citizen science reveals the population exposure to air pollution
Published: 2020-08-18
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Air pollution remains a key environmental problem in an increasingly urbanized world. To quantify health impacts and support informed policies, the population exposure needs to be accurately monitored. However, the inherent spatial variability of air quality poses a tenacious challenge to this. While concentrations of traffic-related pollutants like nitrogen dioxide (NO2) are known to vary over [...]
Bridging the gap between geophysics and geology with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)
Published: 2020-08-16
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Natural Resource Economics, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Inverse mapping from geophysics to geology is a difficult problem due to the inherent uncertainty of geophysical data and the spatially heterogeneous patterns (structure) in geology. We describe GANSim, a type of generative adversarial networks (GANs) that discovers the mapping between remotely-sensed geophysical information and geology with realistic patterns, with a specially designed loss [...]
GeospatialVR: A Web-based Virtual Reality Framework for Collaborative Environmental Simulations
Published: 2020-08-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This research introduces GeospatialVR, an open-source collaborative virtual reality framework to dynamically create 3D real-world environments that can be served on any web platform and accessed via desktop and mobile devices and virtual reality headsets. The framework can generate realistic simulations of desired locations entailing the terrain, elevation model, infrastructures, dynamic [...]
Adopting deep learning methods for airborne RGB fluvial scene classification.
Published: 2020-07-18
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
River environments are among the world’s most threatened ecosystems. Enabled by the rapid development of drone technology, hyperspatial resolution (<10 cm) images of fluvial scenes are now a common data source used to better understand these sensitive habitats. However, the task of image classification remains challenging for this type of imagery and the application of traditional [...]