Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Natural Resources Management and Policy
Coastal Climate Change Adaptation: A Review of Engineering, Nature-Based, Governance, and Socio-Economic Adaptation Strategies
Published: 2026-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Adaptation is becoming a key part of climate policies, including the Paris Agreement, for coastal areas, which host a large proportion of the world's population. Coastal areas are prone to intensive urbanization and tourism, which can exacerbate the threats of sea-level rise, storm intensification, erosion, and saltwater intrusion. Existing reviews have examined engineering, ecological, [...]
Monitoring Carbon Hotspots in Patchy Landscapes from Sparse Lidar and Dense Satellite Time Series
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Monitoring aboveground biomass (AGB) stocks as an indicator of carbon storage is essential for climate mitigation, adaptation, and land management. Across much of Earth’s land surface, carbon stocks are concentrated in fine-scale hotspots, including isolated trees in pastures, shrub patches in tundra, and riparian vegetation in drylands. These carbon hotspots are vulnerable to change but are [...]
Parcel-Level Deforestation Hazard Rates in the Paraguayan Chaco: A Multi-Scale Empirical Analysis of Annual Clearing Dynamics on Large Cattle Ranches
Published: 2026-10-04
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Cattle ranch expansion across the Paraguayan Chaco generates parcel-level clearing rates that appear inconsistent with regional deforestation statistics, raising concerns that REDD+ baselines constructed from proxy parcels overstate forest loss (a baseline over-crediting debate that turns on denominator consistency between parcel hazard and regional flows). Because parcels undergoing active [...]
BEYOND PREDICTION: A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR ADVANCED AI IN AFRICAN SOIL INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Dynamical Systems, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Soil Science, Sustainability
Digital soil mapping has produced the first continent-wide baseline estimates of soil properties in Africa, yet existing soil information systems remain fragmented, poorly standardized, and largely confined to static offline spatial prediction. Their ability to capture near-real-time soil conditions or provide timely, field-level decision support is therefore limited. This paper argues that the [...]
Unlocking Blue Carbon's Potential Requires Targeted Uncertainty Reductions
Published: 2026-09-18
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Sustainability
Coastal “blue” carbon ecosystems like swamps and marshes are among the most efficient natural carbon sinks on Earth. Consequently, restoring and conserving these wetlands is gaining interest from private and government stakeholders as a nature-based solution to offset greenhouse gas emissions and generate revenue through carbon credits. However, the financial viability of blue carbon crediting is [...]
From data availability to evidence sufficiency. PIH MS as an auditable framework for diagnosing hydrogeological knowledge gaps in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
Published: 2026-09-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Groundwater registries can be extensive yet fail to demonstrate the evidence chain required to answer a hydrogeological question. We present PIH MS, an experimental framework that audits a bounded corpus of acquired records and makes knowledge gaps visible without predicting groundwater occurrence. The framework organises 12 evidence layers, nine knowledge dimensions, 39 declared requirement [...]
A safe and just operating space for water at municipal scale: population, agriculture and mining in Chihuahua, Mexico, to 2050
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water allocation decisions in Mexico are taken municipality by municipality, yet water scarcity is assessed at national or basin scale. We operationalize a safe and just operating space for water for each of the 67 municipalities of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest and driest mining state, with both bounds drawn from national law rather than imposed by the analyst: an ecological ceiling equal to the [...]
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 [...]
Contrasting oil and gas methane emission intensities across Algeria's major production basins derived using MethaneSAT data
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Algeria, Africa's largest natural gas producer and a major European Union gas supplier, has limited basin-scale assessment of oil and gas methane emissions. Here, we use MethaneSAT observations from September 2024 to May 2025 to quantify methane emissions across three Algerian production regions representing 73% of national onshore production. Total methane emissions are 18 t h⁻¹ [11–25] in Hassi [...]
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 [...]
Three-Dimensional Modeling of the Underground Mineral Extraction Process: A Dynamic Three-Dimensional Model of Underground Mining Space
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Geotechnical Engineering, Mining Engineering, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences
Three-dimensional models of underground space are a core component of digital twins of mining enterprises. The fundamental requirement for such models is that they must be dynamic — accurately reflecting the current state of their physical counterpart at each moment in time. When developing large underground bedded mineral deposits (coal, potash), the mined horizon constitutes a continuously [...]
Detecting illegal water abstractions using Earth Observation and artificial intelligence: challenges, research gaps, and future directions
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Water scarcity and unsustainable withdrawals are major environmental challenges, particularly in semi-arid and Mediterranean regions where agriculture places strong pressure on limited hydrological resources. Illegal or unreported water abstractions intensify these pressures by undermining ecosystem stability, policy compliance, and long-term water security. Although Earth Observation (EO) and [...]
SCI-OBS: Detection and Classification of People on the Beach and in the Surf Zone
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Understanding how many people use beaches and surf zones, and what they are doing there, is vital for safety, tourism and coastal management. Camera-based studies of coastal recreation have to date recovered attendance: a headcount, sometimes divided into coarse zones. This paper reports the accuracy at which the same infrastructure resolves attendance into activity composition, using a [...]
Leveraging satellite embeddings and national expert annotations for country-level forest land use mapping
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Spatially explicit information on forest as a land use can support climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation actions, as well as supply-chain regulations, but many countries lack recent forest maps consistent with international definitions. Here, we assess a simple and accessible workflow for country-level Forest/Non-Forest mapping using expert reference labels from the FAO Forest [...]
Deep learning methods for the simulation and optimization of shallow geothermal energy systems
Published: 2026-07-01
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computational Engineering, Geology, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Shallow geothermal energy (SGE) systems are crucial for decarbonizing the heating and cooling sector. Their planning, design and operation, however, rely on the simulation of heat transport in the subsurface, a task that is computationally demanding and particularly prohibitive for multi-query applications such as sensitivity analysis and optimization. Deep learning (DL) has recently emerged as a [...]