Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geography
Foundational GIS competence, cognitive demand and essay-response maturity in the Finnish geography matriculation examination
Published: 2026-06-22
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Science and Mathematics Education
This study analyses how upper secondary students demonstrate foundational GIS competence in essay responses to a Finnish geography matriculation examination. A random sample of 100 Finnish-language responses was examined using qualitative deductive content analysis, the revised Bloom’s taxonomy, the SOLO taxonomy, and the GeoTAITO model. The task addressed geographic information, spatial [...]
Pedagogical integration of digital GIS tools in secondary education: Teachers’ uses, classroom organisation, and constraints
Published: 2026-06-22
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography
This study examines how geography teachers implement GIS-related digital work in secondary education and what this reveals about the pedagogical integration of specialised digital tools. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 Finnish lower and upper secondary geography teachers, the study analyses the tools teachers use, the pedagogical organisation of GIS-related work, and the factors [...]
How Do General Upper Secondary School Students Interpret Map Information? Geomedia Literacy and Visual Map Elements in Finland’s Geography Matriculation Examination
Published: 2026-06-22
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Language and Literacy Education
This study examines general upper secondary school students’ geomedia literacy in a high-stakes assessment context by analysing 272 essay answers to a map-related question in Finland’s nationwide geography Matriculation Examination (spring 2020). The task (“Vis-ual elements of a good map”) asked students to identify at least five map elements and justify what each element conveys using a provided [...]
Socio-Demographic Predictors of Earthquake Preparedness Among University Students: Evidence from a Public University in Bangladesh
Published: 2026-06-20
Subjects: Geography
Bangladesh is exceptionally prone to recurring hydrological and meteorological disasters, which have traditionally dominated the national policy and disaster management discourse. Consequently, seismic risk remains heavily underemphasized, leaving major urban centers like Dhaka highly vulnerable to catastrophic human and structural losses from potential earthquakes. While structural mitigation [...]
AEF-Econ: Toward Plug-and-Play Socioeconomic Foundation Embeddings from AlphaEarth for Urban Remote Sensing
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) unify global remote sensing foundation embeddings through multimodal self-supervised learning, but their pretraining focuses on physical land-surface signals, limiting plug-and-play use in socioeconomic tasks. We integrate seven heterogeneous data streams across 36 Chinese cities over eight years—AEF embeddings, population, nighttime lights, remote sensing indices, [...]
Two decades of kilometer-scale daily PM2.5 from satellite observations and machine learning reveal geographically diverging exposure in Ghana
Published: 2026-06-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a major contributor to global burden of disease, yet air quality data remain sparse in many low- and middle-income countries, limiting nationwide monitoring and effective policy development. We address this gap by developing a high-resolution gridded (1 km × 1 km) dataset for daily surface PM2.5 concentrations in Ghana from 2005 to 2025 by training [...]
Climate overshoot and the insurability frontier: peak stress, domestic capacity, and market retreat risk
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Sciences
Climate overshoot can create mid-century peaks in climate stress before end-century temperatures stabilize, but its implications for insurance availability remain poorly understood. We assess subnational insurance market exit risk under overshoot across 1,590 first-order administrative regions in 88 countries, covering 4.54 billion people. Combining ADM1-level multi-hazard climate stress, an [...]
Operationalising EMS-98 Damage Classification: A UAV-to-GIS Pipeline for Macroseismic Survey Support
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Post-earthquake macroseismic surveying often relies on ground-based visual inspections that are slow, costly, and difficult to scale in the immediate aftermath of a seismic event. Deep-learning damage detectors have advanced substantially in recent years, yet their outputs are rarely translated into operational deployment tools that yield a georeferenced dataframe of buildings aligned with the [...]
Multidimensional Inconsistency in Forest Ecosystem Representation: An NLP-Assisted Thematic Review
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography
Forest ecosystem monitoring increasingly relies on multisensor remote sensing approaches integrating optical imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and LiDAR observations to assess biomass, degradation, and ecosystem condition. However, these systems frequently generate inconsistent representations of the same ecosystem due to differences in sensor sensitivity, ecological complexity, scale [...]
What works in agrarian adaptation: a systematic assessment of CGIAR climate research evidence
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Geography
Effective climate adaptation in agrarian settings is critical for the billions of people whose livelihoods depend on agriculture, yet evidence on what adaptation actions actually reduce climate risk remains fragmented and difficult to generalize. In this study we assess the effectiveness of agrarian adaptation using 403 empirical case studies published by CGIAR scientists and partners in [...]
Forest or tundra? How different vegetation reconstructions of Last Glacial landscapes in Europe may shape our perception of early human dispersal processes
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical and Environmental Geography
Regional variability and long-term changes of past ecosystems likely had a strong impact on hunter-gatherer population dynamics, including the expansion of anatomically modern humans and the disappearance of Neanderthals. However, our understanding of these ecosystems remains limited, even when looking at large-scale patterns, such as the extent and distribution of forested areas. Vegetation [...]
Wildlife tourism in times of crisis: A critical discourse analysis of media coverage during the Covid-19 pandemic
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Geography
Tourism is a growing, if controversial, approach to wildlife conservation. Constructed on neoliberal ideological assumptions, tourism-as-conservation-strategies can reinforce social inequalities and patterns of historical oppression. This model of conservation and economic development is also vulnerable to global market trends and disruptions. In this paper we use content and critical discourse [...]
A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Diagnosing Inconsistencies in Remote Sensing-Based Ecosystem Assessment
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography
Remote sensing-based ecosystem assessment increasingly relies on the integration of spectral, structural, and model-derived datasets; however, inconsistencies among these data sources can produce divergent representations of vegetation dynamics and carbon processes. This study proposes a multi-dimensional framework to diagnose such inconsistencies by integrating scale, dimensional, and variable [...]
Closing the Digital Gap in Nigerian Land Records: An Open-Source QGIS Plugin for Cadastral Survey Archiving and Spatial Management
Published: 2026-05-03
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Secure, retrievable cadastral records are foundational to land tenure security and effective land administration, yet most private cadastral surveying firms in Nigeria maintain survey records exclusively on paper, a structural limitation that prevents spatial querying, concurrent access, and long-term integrity verification across the 50-year archival period required by the Survey Co-ordination [...]
Evidence of non-additional pig manure offset projects
Published: 2026-04-26
Subjects: Geography
Each carbon offset represents the claim that one ton of CO₂ emissions has been avoided or removed from the atmosphere. For offsets to deliver real climate benefits, the emission reductions they represent must be “additional,” meaning they would not have occurred without financial support from the carbon market. Despite its importance, additionality has proven difficult to achieve in practice. [...]