Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
Complex Realities, Simple Signals? Global Evaluation of Early Warning Signals for Forest Mortality Events
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Sustainability
Forests around the world are increasingly experiencing large-scale regional mortality events as a result of droughts and heat waves. Despite their considerable impacts on the material, non-material, and regulatory contributions of forest ecosystems to people, these mortality events remain difficult to predict. Temporal Early Warning Signals (EWS) based on the concept of Critical Slowing Down [...]
A Global Dataset of Alpine Treeline Elevational Transects
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The Alpine Treeline Ecotone (ATE) is an important ecological transition zone at the juncture of montane forests and alpine vegetation. It serves as a crucial habitat for diverse species and a sensitive indicator of climate change. Consistent characterization of the elevational gradients of ATE is challenging due to complex topography and data limitations. This study introduces a comprehensive [...]
HydroVerse VR Equipment Hub: An Integrated Virtual Reality Framework for Training and Workforce Development in Environmental Monitoring
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Adult and Continuing Education, Computer Engineering, Educational Methods, Engineering Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring
Environmental monitoring is critical for managing ecosystems and addressing global challenges such as climate change and pollution. However, training professionals in this field is often hampered by remote locations, hazardous field conditions, and limited access to specialized equipment. In response, this paper presents the HydroVerse VR Equipment Hub, an immersive virtual reality framework for [...]
Multi-Task Learning as a Step Toward Building General-Purpose Hydrological Forecasting Systems
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Multivariate Analysis
Streamflow and soil moisture are two critical variables in the hydrological cycle, linked through infiltration, runoff generation, and groundwater recharge. Traditional forecasting approaches often treat them independently, overlooking interdependencies and limiting predictive skill. This study investigates Multi-Task Learning (MTL) for daily prediction of both variables using the CAMELS dataset [...]
A Collaborative Assessment of Coastal Ocean Acidification Monitoring in Maine & Standard Operating Procedures and Best Practices for the Collection of Continuous pH Data in Coastal Marine Environments
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The ‘Sensor Squad’ of the Maine Ocean Climate Collaborative is the product of a 2023 Maine Coastal and Marine Climate Action Fund grant to conduct “A two-year pilot project designed to address and overcome technological barriers to ocean acidification data collection, develop protocols to elevate quality assurance and ensure comparable data, and meet regularly to discuss project results and data [...]
Machine learning approaches to Landsat change detection analysis
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
The Landsat mission has captured images of the Earth’s surface for over 50 years, and the data have enabled researchers to investigate a vast array of different change phenomena using machine learning models. Landsat-based monitoring research has been influential in geography, forestry, hydrology, ecology, agriculture, geology, and public health. When monitoring Earth's surface change using [...]
Global deep learning model for delineation of optically shallow and optically deep water in Sentinel-2 imagery
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
In aquatic remote sensing, algorithms commonly used to map environmental variables rely on assumptions regarding the optical environment. Specifically, some algorithms assume that the water is optically deep, i.e., that the influence of bottom reflectance on the measured signal is negligible. Other algorithms assume the opposite and are based on an estimation of the bottom-reflected part of the [...]
Transformer Assisted U-Net for Marine Litter Detection on Sentinel-2 Imagery
Published: 2025-10-05
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
The contamination of marine environments with man-made litter is a growing nation-wide concern. Satellite imagery combined with deep learning–based detection models has emerged as a robust and cost-effective solution for large-scale marine litter monitoring. In this article, we present a novel deep learning-based scheme to detect marine litter using Sentinel-2 imagery based on the Deep UNet [...]
Insights from the Unseen - Occlusion in Forest Laser Scanning
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Laser scanning is a powerful tool for assessing the structural complexity of forests and its role in ecosystem processes and functioning. Laser scans are however highly affected by occlusion (where objects block laser pulses), resulting in data gaps within the 3D representation of the forest. Although occlusion is a well-known and frequently discussed challenge for estimating forest structural [...]
Detection of coastal flooding with TinyCamML: a low-cost, privacy-preserving cellular-connected camera with onboard ML
Published: 2025-09-18
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Systems and Communications
Chronic flooding is an issue for low-lying coastal communities globally, and it is expected to worsen with rising sea levels. In contrast to floods driven by extreme storms, predicting when and where these floods occur can be difficult as they can be hyper-local and short-lived, depending on the flood drivers (e.g., tides, rain). These factors make it difficult to measure the full spatial and [...]
Quantification of natural CO2 emissions from mofettes using a low-cost sensor network at the Starzach site in south-west Germany
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology
We present a top-down method to derive carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from mofettes, using only point measurement time series at irregular locations. Notably, no wind vector information is needed, as gas transport is derived from cross-correlations between sensor stations and subsequently integrated using Gauss’ divergence theorem. The method is applied to an existing low-cost sensor network at [...]
A Quantitative Analysis of Light Pollution in Gurgaon and a Deepened Understanding of its Impacts
Published: 2025-09-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Light pollution is an emerging environmental and health challenge in rapidly urbanizing Indian cities. This study quantifies night-sky brightness across Gurgaon using a low-cost, Arduino-based Sky Quality Meter (SQM) and integrates these measurements with perception surveys from 91 residents. A total of 62 ground-based data points were collected, revealing distinct spatial variations: highly [...]
Advancing Long-Horizon Hydrological Forecasting: A Mamba-based Approach with Explainable AI for Generalized Streamflow Prediction
Published: 2025-09-02
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Accurate long-horizon streamflow forecasting is crucial for water resource management, but existing models often face efficiency and interpretability challenges. This study comprehensively evaluates the Mamba architecture, which utilizes State Space Models for efficient sequence processing, for 120-hour hourly generalized streamflow prediction across 125 diverse Iowa watersheds using 72-hour [...]
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 [...]