Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geography
Testing the Fluorescence Advantage: Solar-Induced Fluorescence as an Early Indicator of Agricultural Drought Stress in Marathwada, Maharashtra
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Drought detection in India, both for official declaration purposes and for triggering payouts under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) crop-insurance scheme, still leans heavily on rainfall-deficit records and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) — two signals that only move once a crop has already begun to visibly suffer. This study asks whether Solar-Induced Fluorescence [...]
Stolen Strata: Quantifying the Anthropogenic Erasure of Kashmir's Karewa Terraces and Its Threat to the Saffron Economy
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Karewa terraces are elevated, flat-topped deposits of intermontane lake-basin age (Pleistocene/Pliocene), and they underlie one of Kashmir's most economically significant agricultural systems — the saffron-growing belt at Pampore. Everyone who follows agriculture in Kashmir already knows these terraces are vanishing under unregulated soil mining and uncontrolled urban expansion; there's ample [...]
Ghost Infrastructure: Historical Industrial Geography and the Persistence of Path-Dependent Accessibility in Bochum, Germany
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
The complete 69,393 pedestrian street node network from Bochum was used for a Welch's t-test, which revealed as a surprise that street nodes with low accessibility are actually significantly farther from historical industrial sites than street nodes with high accessibility (t=42.887, p<0.00001, Cohen's d=0.589 - medium-to-large effect), which is the opposite of what the original hypothesis [...]
The Cotton Line: Testing the Institutional Persistence of an Erased Colonial Land-Tenure Boundary Across Vidarbha's Agrarian and Vegetation Geography
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, International and Area Studies, Statistics and Probability
Are there 150-year-old institutional legacies measurable in the 21st century as a spatial signature, in patterns of vegetation phenology (cotton signatures), agrarian labor structure, land use and land surface temperature? That is the core question this paper addresses and the design is not a 'before'-'after', it's a 'spatial discontinuity' test to see if there is still a measurable gap across an [...]
Landslide Susceptibility Modelling and Infrastructure Exposure in the Zillertal, Austrian Alps
Published: 2026-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Landslides are a major threat in alpine regions, as steep terrain, complex geology and locally concentrated infrastructure increase societal exposure to landslide hazards. This study develops a landslide susceptibility model for the Zillertal (Tyrol, Austria), utilizing a Random Forest modelling approach. A high-resolution landslide susceptibility map was created using seven geomorphometric, [...]
Global Power Outage Detection at the Kilometer Scale from Satellite Nighttime Lights
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Power and Energy, Public Health, Remote Sensing
Satellite nighttime light observations show great promise for remote sensing of power outages, yet have only been utilized in limited case studies to date. Here, we present generalized detection of power outages across the globe at ~1-kilometer resolution. Our method, the Outage frameWork for Luminosity Interruptions (OWL-I), reveals the power outages can be reliably detected from VIIRS/Black [...]
Annual high-resolution global ambient population estimates from 1975 to 2024
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Gridded population data support assessments of human exposure, settlement change, infrastructure demand, and access to services, yet global datasets combining annual coverage over multiple decades with fine spatial resolution remain limited. LandScan Mosaic Time Series provides 50 annual estimates of global ambient population distribution at 3 arc-second resolution from 1975 through 2024. The [...]
Assessing the protective role of active agriculture in wildfire exposure in a Mediterranean region
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Geography
Global change and rural abandonment are restructuring Mediterranean fire regimes, as landscapes once characterized by heterogeneous agricultural mosaics are progressively replaced by homogenized, drought-limited fuel complexes. This transformation increases the likelihood of high-intensity wildfire events and their associated impacts. This study applied a stochastic fire-spread modeling framework [...]
Accessibility and its many dimensions: why ‘geographical accessibility’ alone is not enough
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Other Geography
More precise terminology in geographical scholarship is needed when scholars refer to distance-, travel-time-, travel-cost-, or network-based accessibility. They should explicitly use the term geographical accessibility rather than accessibility in general. The argument is not that existing accessibility research ignores temporal, social, economic, informational, or perceived dimensions. On the [...]
S²AM-Net: Structure-semantic SAM-guided Network for Few-Shot Segmentation in Mining Areas
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Remote Sensing
Precise mining land-cover classification is essential for monitoring environmental degradation and ecological restoration. Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) offers a promising solution under limited annotations, but it still faces common challenges such as ambiguous foreground features and overfitting to the small support set. Moreover, mining landscapes are characterized by highly detailed structures, [...]
Comparing feature maps generated using UNet-like CNN, Transformer, Mamba, and hybrid architectures for general land cover mapping
Published: 2026-07-12
Subjects: Geography
This study compares feature maps produced by semantic segmentation architectures using varying combinations of convolutional neural network (CNN), Transformer, and Mamba selective state space (selective SSM) components with a goal of exploring the following question: does correlation or similarity between the generated data abstractions imply comparable predictive performance? Specifically, [...]
Climate-mode-conditioned exposure of a sporting mega-event: an event-based assessment of Rugby World Cup 2027 in Australia
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The environmental risk of sporting mega-events is usually assessed from host-city climatologies or, more recently, from tournament design (venue, date, kick-off time). Both overlook a distinct axis: the interannual state of the large-scale climate modes into which a given edition falls. We ask to what extent the phase of the El Ni\~no--Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) [...]
Teaching geomedia literacy in school geography: Teachers’ perspectives on students’ interpretive and productive skills
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Language and Literacy Education, Other Geography, Science and Mathematics Education, Spatial Science
Maps, diagrams, images, and visualisations are central to how geographical knowledge is learned and communicated in school. Drawing on 20 interviews with Finnish lower and upper secondary geography teachers, this article analyses geomedia literacy as disciplinary literacy through an abductive, theory-informed thematic analysis. Teachers described geomedia as the everyday representational language [...]
Foundational GIS competence, cognitive demand and essay-response maturity in the Finnish geography matriculation examination
Published: 2026-06-21
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: 2026-06-21
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography
Secondary-school GIS teaching offers a window into how geospatial workflows are translated into classroom practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 Finnish lower and upper secondary geography teachers, this article analyses the tools teachers use, the pedagogical organisation of GIS-related work, and the factors shaping its scope, depth, and continuity. The findings show that [...]