Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geography
ml4xcube: Machine Learning Toolkits for Earth System Data Cubes
Published: 2024-10-09
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Computer Engineering, Engineering, Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Rapidly changing climate conditions and the increase in extreme events are posing severe challenges to human life and infrastructure, requiring sophisticated analytical capabilities for hazard prediction and disaster risk management. Earth System Data Cubes (ESDCs) have become an essential tool in Earth System Sciences (ESS) by organizing large-scale, multivariate environmental datasets into a [...]
Virtual laser scanning of dynamic scenes (VLS-4D): Current approaches and future perspectives in remote sensing
Published: 2024-10-07
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Virtual laser scanning (VLS) has proven to be a useful tool for survey planning, method development and training data generation in a variety of areas of Earth and environmental sciences. Until recently, most applications have used static representations of the real or a fictive environment, neglecting the inherent dynamics of our world, that also affect Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) [...]
Adaptive capacity in Pacific Islands: responding to coastal and climatic change in Nagigi village, Fiji
Published: 2024-10-02
Subjects: Geography
Coastal communities across the Pacific are increasingly recognized as places of priority for climate adaptation. Pacific Island communities are developing and using strategies to adapt their lives and livelihoods to climatic and environmental risks. Highlighting the case study of Nagigi village, Fiji, we identify adaptation responses to multiple environmental and socio-economic pressures [...]
The Socioeconomic Impacts of Sea Level Rise and Phragmites australis in the New Jersey Meadowlands
Published: 2024-10-01
Subjects: Geography, Natural Resource Economics, Nature and Society Relations, Plant Sciences
Sea level rise is one of the most alarming impacts of climate change and is projected to have devastating economic consequences for coastal communities such as increased flood damage, lost economic productivity, and decreased property values. To measure this impact in the New Jersey Meadowlands, an urban estuary ecosystem, I used a digital elevation model (DEM) to create inundation maps modeling [...]
Private protected areas exhibit greater bias towards unproductive land compared to public protected areas
Published: 2024-09-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Globally, private protected areas (PPAs) have become an important tool for biodiversity conservation. While they are expanding in size and number, there is limited evidence on their potential impact on avoiding biodiversity loss, and how this impact compares to the public protected areas (PAs). The impact of protection is measured as the actual biodiversity outcome within the area protected [...]
Deciphering Climate Variability Trends: Unveiling the Impact on Household Staple Crop Productivity in East Wallaga Zone, Ethiopia
Published: 2024-09-05
Subjects: Geography
This study looks at how Ethiopia's East Wallaga Zone's staple crop yields are affected by climate variability between 1990 and 2022. The main goal is to evaluate the effects of temperature and precipitation variations on the production of important crops, namely wheat and teff, in the highlands, midlands, and lowlands of various agroecological zones. The Ethiopian Meteorological Institute, [...]
Comprehensive Assessment of Flood Risk and Vulnerability for Essential Facilities: Iowa Case Study
Published: 2024-08-02
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Of all natural disasters that occur on this planet, flood events are universally one of the most common and most destructive. As climate change and human actions continue to cause the occurrence of flood events to rise, it becomes increasingly important that the effects of flooding are analyzed and understood. In this study, nine different types of critical amenities in the state of Iowa (such as [...]
Global mercury records from natural archives reveal ecosystem responses to changing atmospheric deposition
Published: 2024-05-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography
Global ecosystems face mercury contamination, yet long-term data is scarce, hindering understanding of ecosystem responses to atmospheric Hg input changes and policy evaluation. To address this gap, this study compiled a global mercury accumulation flux database using 221 cores from peat, lake, ice, and marine deposits. From 1700 to 2012, global averaged fluxes in peat, lake, ice, and marine [...]
GeoAI and the Future of Spatial Analytics
Published: 2024-05-01
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Library and Information Science, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This chapter discusses the challenges of traditional spatial analytical methods in their limited capacity to handle big and messy data, as well as mining unknown or latent patterns. It then introduces a new form of spatial analytics – geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) - and describes the advantages of this new strategy in big data analytics and data-driven discovery. Finally, a [...]
Unified in diversity: Unravelling emerging knowledge on drought impact cascades via participatory modeling
Published: 2024-04-04
Subjects: Geography
Diverse groups exhibit enhanced capabilities in tackling complex problems compared to individuals. Also, involving diverse stakeholders has been shown to improve the understanding of complex social-ecological systems. Considering this, we investigated how pooling the knowledge of diverse stakeholder crowds can create new, emergent knowledge on cascading drought impacts. We define ‘emergent [...]
Climatic and geological insights on geochemical signatures left in ancient glass
Published: 2024-02-26
Subjects: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Geography
Glass artifacts have been the subject of extensive trade as exquisite items of the social elite since ancient times. Vestiges of their production and migration are still visible around the globe. To comprehend the historical narrative of human life encapsulated within them, it is imperative to ascertain their inception, which directly correlates with the identification of raw materials used in [...]
Intertwining volcanoes and society in Chile through arts and interdisciplinary connections
Published: 2023-11-08
Subjects: Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The separation between nature and society, of concern within social science and interdisciplinary discussions, has generated a division that often characterizes the way communities perceive their environment. The arts have played an important role in demonstrating the entanglement of Earth and society through their ability to frame and shape the dynamics of the Earth across sensations. This has [...]
Large-scale green grabbing for wind and solar PV development in Brazil
Published: 2023-08-22
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Large-scale wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) infrastructures are expanding rapidly in Brazil. These projects can exacerbate struggles for land rooted in weak land governance, with negative impacts for traditional populations due to loss of access to common lands. Here, we trace how green grabbing, i.e. the large-scale appropriation and control of (undesignated) public lands, both formally legal [...]
A Web-based Decision Support Framework for Optimizing Road Network Accessibility and Emergency Facility Allocation During Flooding
Published: 2023-08-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Risk Analysis
Transportation systems can be significantly affected by flooding, leading to physical damage and subsequent adverse impacts such as increased travel distance to essential services. Even though flooding is a frequently recurring phenomenon that can affect thousands of people per event, there are limited accessible online tools available for analyzing and visualizing flood risk for supporting [...]
The climate and environmental determinants of domestic water supply change at the Nasia catchment in Northern Ghana
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Geography
The Nasia river serves as the primary source of domestic water supply for over 5000 households in the Nasia catchment. However, the river is currently experiencing water stress conditions, causing an imbalance between the demand for water and the available supply. In this study, we evaluated the impact of climate and environmental factors on changes in domestic water supply in the Nasia [...]