Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
HIGH-RESOLUTION DIGITAL TERRAIN MODEL FOR THE ITALIAN TERRITORY
Published: 2026-03-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Engineering Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Mining Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Social and Behavioral Sciences
High-resolution digital terrain models are essential for environmental planning and territorial analyses, and provide foundations for geomorphological and hydrological applications, including flood and landslide modelling and geo-hydrological hazard and risk assessments. In Italy, airborne LiDAR surveys have improved the representation of terrain morphology in the last decade, but their coverage [...]
Validation of ICESat-2 ATL13 Version 7 Water Surface Elevation on Small High-Latitude Rivers: A Case Study of the River Dee and River Don, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Published: 2026-03-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Satellite Laser Altimetry represents an attractive opportunity to supplement the sparsely distributed in situ gauge network used to monitor rivers. The performance of satellite laser altimetry on small, high latitude streams has however been characterized as being poor. This research will be validating ICESat-2 ATL13 version 7 measured water surface elevations (WSE) for the River Dee (average [...]
From environmental observation to shared narratives through human-AI interaction
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A structural bottleneck limits sustainability practices: many people can participate in environmental observation, but far fewer can participate in the synthesis work that turns observations into shared narratives that guide action. We term this disparity "synthesis inequality". Citizen-science programs have expanded public access to data collection, yet data interpretation largely remains [...]
Who holds Brazil’s biodiversity? The pivotal role of private landholders
Published: 2026-01-30
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The urgency of tackling the biodiversity crisis across the tropics is clear, yet governance structures such as land tenure can act as barriers or enablers for conservation. Here, we focus on Brazil, a megadiverse country that has made major efforts to link deforestation to individual properties through self-reported environmental registries. Yet, how these efforts support biodiversity explicitly, [...]
Opportunities to integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation across strategic, adaptive and transformative pathways
Published: 2026-01-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Calls to integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation promote synergistic action. However, narrow, intervention- or sector-specific perspectives obscure complexities shaping how these agendas are operationalised in practice. This paper explores opportunities for integration from a systemic perspective, viewing climate resilient futures as emerging from diverse changes across sectors, [...]
Spatio-temporal accessibility modelling with mobile and GTFS data: Insights from Helsinki
Published: 2025-12-22
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This paper presents a spatially explicit method for evaluating urban accessibility using anonymised mobile phone origin-destination data combined with GTFS-based public transport travel times. Focusing on the Helsinki Capital Region, we apply cumulative and potential accessibility metrics across multiple transport modes to assess spatial and temporal variation in mobility patterns. The [...]
El Niño amplified food insecurity in early modern Europe
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a dominant source of global inter annual climate variability, yet its long-term influence on food security remains poorly understood. Drawing on a recently compiled dataset of 160 European famines and a new high-resolution ENSO reconstruction, we show a robust correspondence between positive ENSO anomalies (El Niño events) and subsistence crises during [...]
Misalignments between national mangrove monitoring capacities and climate policy ambitions
Published: 2025-12-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ambitious global targets for mangrove conservation have advanced rapidly in recent years, yet the implementation of these commitments depends largely on national monitoring systems and policy processes. Despite widespread reliance on country-reported data for setting and evaluating targets, little is known about how national mangrove statistics are generated or how they interact with climate [...]
Thermal Power and Climate Change: A Data-Driven Analysis of Cause and Effect, 1800-2100
Published: 2025-11-20
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Since 2020, global politics have shifted sharply to the right—nowhere more visibly than in the United States and Europe. By 2024, this rightward turn in the U.S. culminated in open climate-change denial, the defunding of clean-energy initiatives, and a widespread rejection of scientific evidence. Major domestic and international institutions—NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Weather Bureau, EPA, USDA, FDA, [...]
The Geography of Insufficient Sleep in the Contiguous United States (CONUS)
Published: 2025-11-14
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Insufficient sleep is becoming increasingly prevalent, partially because of the accelerated pace of modern life, and is linked to a wide range of adverse physical and mental health outcomes. While several social, physical, and environmental factors are known to influence sleep duration, the underlying mechanisms and their geographic variability remain poorly understood. The growing availability [...]
Disturbance and incomplete recovery in the Cerrado-Amazon transition: Implications for conservation of a critical tropical ecotone
Published: 2025-10-20
Subjects: Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Cerrado-Amazon Transition (CAT) is the world's largest tropical forest–savanna ecotone and a key component of Brazil's “Arc of Deforestation”. It harbours high biodiversity but remains weakly protected and increasingly exposed to agricultural expansion, deforestation, and fire. Using Landsat time series (1986–2020), we developed a disturbance–recovery framework to track how repeated and [...]
Unlocking Gigatonne-scale Carbon Dioxide Removal with strategic tipping point frameworks
Published: 2025-10-17
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Achieving global climate mitigation requires a rapid acceleration of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) to gigatonne (Gt) scales by 2040. Linear growth in climate solutions is insufficient to reach these targets, but system-change practices and leveraging interventions that trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks ("tipping points"), offer a solution. Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) in Brazil is uniquely [...]
Toward Greater Clarity: Reanalyzing Solomon’s Depiction of the Ross Ice Shelf Atmospheric Dynamic
Published: 2025-10-10
Subjects: Education, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In the final chapters of The Coldest March: Scott's Fatal Antarctic Expedition, Dr. Susan Solomon analyzes the meteorological conditions surrounding the last blizzard that claimed the lives of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Dr. Edward Wilson, and Lieutenant Henry Bowers. The book’s conclusion—that the storm could not have lasted ten days and that the men may have chosen to die—warrants close [...]
Contrasting patterns of deforestation and reforestation in India’s tropical dry woodlands
Published: 2025-10-07
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Tropical dry woodlands are key ecosystems for global biodiversity, carbon storage, and forest-based livelihoods in some of the poorest regions of the world. Many of these woodlands have been historically converted and degraded, and while recovery occurs in some areas, the pressure on remaining tropical dry woodlands remains high. Despite this, our understanding of spatial patterns of tropical dry [...]
Adverse Climate: Addressing Inclusion and Diversity Issues in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment and beyond
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this essay, we reflect on what it means for the scientific community to collaborate effectively in global scientific assessments, drawing on our experience within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and with relevance beyond the IPCC to many other scientific collaborations. We amplify IPCC author voices through lived-experience narratives that reveal how systemic barriers [...]