Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geography
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
In geography, ‘accessibility’ is often used as shorthand for geographical accessibility (distance, travel time, travel cost, and related spatial measures). Yet accessibility carries different established meanings across disciplines, so geographers should name geographical accessibility explicitly when that is what is meant. This discussion paper argues that geographical accessibility is only one [...]
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
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: 2026-06-21
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 [...]