Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Saving the world from your couch: The heterogeneous medium-run benefits of COVID-19 lockdowns on air pollution
Published: 2020-12-12
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In Spring 2020, COVID-19 led to an unprecedented halt in public and economic life across the globe. In an otherwise tragic time, this provides a unique natural experiment to investigate the environmental impact of such a (temporary) ``de-globalization". Here, we estimate the medium-run impact of a battery of COVID-19 related lockdown measures on air quality across 162 countries, going beyond the [...]
ENSO Drives Child Undernutrition in the Global Tropics
Published: 2020-11-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Other Environmental Sciences, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a principal component of global climate variability known to influence a host of social and economic outcomes, but its systematic effects on human health remain poorly understood. We estimate ENSO’s association with child nutrition at global scale by combining variation in ENSO intensity from 1986-2018 with children’s height and weight from 186 surveys [...]
The Emergent Influence of Anthropogenic Warming on Global Crop Yields
Published: 2020-10-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistical Methodology
A large literature on “detection and attribution” has now demonstrated the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions on a range of physical climate variables. Social and economic outcomes are known to be sensitive to climate change, but directly connecting observed changes to anthropogenic forcing is challenging. Here I estimate the effect of anthropogenic warming on global crop yield [...]
Mapping Research Topics at Multiple Levels of Detail
Published: 2020-07-12
Subjects: Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Institutional reviews typically rely on scientometrics, like the h-index and impact factors of their participants, to assess research productivity. Productivity is not the only review criterion however, and scientometrics can be difficult to generate and compare in multidisciplinary settings. “Distant reading” methods from the Digital Humanities can complement the current quantitative evaluation [...]
Finding karstic caves and rockshelters in the Inner Asian mountain corridor using predictive modelling and field survey
Published: 2020-07-10
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
The area of the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC) follows the foothills and piedmont zones around the northern limits of Asia’s interior mountains, connecting two important areas for human evolution: the Fergana valley and the Siberian Altai. Prior research has suggested the IAMC may have provided an area of connected refugia from harsh climates during the Pleistocene. To date, this region [...]
Climate has contrasting direct and indirect effects on armed conflicts
Published: 2020-07-08
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Library and Information Science, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistics and Probability
There is an active debate regarding the influence that climate has on the risk of armed conflict, which stems from challenges in assembling unbiased datasets, competing hypotheses on the mechanisms of climate influence, and the difficulty of disentangling direct and indirect climate effects. We use gridded historical non-state conflict records, satellite data, and land surface models in a [...]
Two Pixel Reference Algorithm
Published: 2020-06-18
Subjects: Engineering, Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Object based image analysis (OBIA) has a unique process requirement: relate all the pixels in the segmented images to the vectorized polygons (pixel in polygon). The existing solutions are very slow in finding the pixels in a polygon. This paper proposes a novel algorithm called Two-Pixel-Reference to speed up the process. The algorithm is initially designed for segmented remote sensing images. [...]
Increased air pollution exposure among the Chinese population during the national quarantine in 2020
Published: 2020-06-15
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The COVID-19 quarantine in China is thought to have been beneficial for reducing the population exposure to ambient air pollution. The overall exposure also depends, however, on indoor air quality and human mobility and activities, which also changed during the pandemic. Here we integrate real-time mobility data, questionnaire survey on during-pandemic human activity patterns, advanced air [...]
COVID-19 Pandemic – Possible implications and effects of monsoons in the Indian sub-continent.
Published: 2020-06-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The world is facing an unprecedented time owing to the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic. The research community is racing to find a solution to contain the outbreak, leading to the proposals of many possible routes of the virus transmission and its dynamics. The Indian sub-continent is about to experience the monsoon season, which often leads to heavy rainfall and flooding in the region, affecting the [...]
A framework to quantify the human footprint in Africa using supply and demand of net primary production
Published: 2020-05-28
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science, Sustainability
The human-environment connection in the mostly rural drylands of Africa forms a complex, interlinked system that provides ecosystem services. This system is susceptible to climatic variability that impacts the supply of its products, and high population growth, which impacts the demand for these products. When plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis, [...]
Hidden Stories: Topic Modeling in Hydrology Literature
Published: 2020-05-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Library and Information Science, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Hydrologic research generates large volumes of peer-reviewed literature across a number of evolving sub-topics. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for scientists and practitioners to synthesize this full body of literature. This study explores topic modeling as a form of unsupervised learning applied to 42,154 article-abstracts from six high-impact (Impact Factor > 0.9) journals (Water [...]
Addressing Model Data Archiving Needs for the Department of Energy’s Environmental Systems Science Community
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Researchers in the Department of Energy’s ESS program use a variety of models to advance robust, scale-aware predictions of terrestrial and subsurface ecosystems. ESS projects typically conduct field observations and experiments coupled with modeling exercises using a model-experimental (ModEx) approach that enables iterative co-development of experiments and models, and ensures that experimental [...]
Machine Learning on Greenest Pixels for Crop Mapping
Published: 2020-04-14
Subjects: Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Remotely sensed signals from crop fields are full of variabilities due to the complex interactions among the environment, seeds, climate, market, and farmers. It is a common phenomenon that the crops in neighbouring fields are in different growing stages, e.g., the corns are in the V5 leaf stage in one field and V10 stage in another neighbouring field. The phenomenon results in remote sensing [...]
Concepts of space, time and scale
Published: 2020-04-11
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Concepts of space, time and scale as well as their underpinning theories are crucial for understanding geospatial data. Space can be defined as a boundless, three-dimensional (3D) extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Space has been considered to be absolute, meaning that it exists permanently and independently regardless of any matter in space. [...]
Fundamental laws and principles in geoinformation science
Published: 2020-04-11
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Scientific laws are empirical statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. There are scientific laws and law-like statements also in the field of geoinformation sciences. Based on the Tobler’s first law of geography, “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”. This first law [...]