Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geography
The disaster trap: cyclones, tourism, colonial legacies, and the systemic feedbacks exacerbating disaster risk
Published: 2021-05-05
Subjects: Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography
The long, open-ended period of recovery from a disaster event is the phase of a disaster that the interdisciplinary field of disaster studies struggles to understand. In the process of rebuilding, places do not simply reset – they transform, often in ways that confound any reduction of disaster risk, instead making people and settings more vulnerable to future hazard events. Reducing disaster [...]
High resolution, annual maps of field boundaries for smallholder-dominated croplands at national scales
Published: 2021-03-13
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Mapping the characteristics of Africa's smallholder-dominated croplands, including the sizes and numbers of fields, can provide critical insights into food security and a range of other socioeconomic and environmental concerns. However, accurately mapping these systems is difficult because there is 1) a spatial and temporal mismatch between satellite sensors and smallholder fields, and 2) a lack [...]
Linkage between the Forest Fires and the Meteorological Parameters during the current climatic regime using Spatial Clustering, Regression, and Combination Matrix Analysis
Published: 2021-02-26
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
The present study has been carried out to assess the spatial behaviour of forest fire count (FFC) data and Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) derived meteorological parameters in Uttar Pradesh to explore the linkages amongst them. Ten years (2005 to 2014) of forest fire event data and of meteorological data have been analysed using GIS overlay, ordinary least square (OLS) regression, [...]
Increase data sharing or die? An initial view for natural catastrophe insurance
Published: 2021-02-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education, Environmental Sciences, Geography
This article is an illustration of Geography in action, recounting an investigation into an industry's views of data sharing. The insurance sector is fundamentally analytics driven and based on geospatial data. One option for more effective and efficient insurance for natural hazard risks (e.g. flooding, earthquake) is, in theory, to increase the sharing of data between the various [...]
Climate change research and action must look beyond 2100
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth’s climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for prediction. Estimating the effects of past, current, and potential future emissions to only 2100 is therefore [...]
Optimizing Crop Cut Collection for Determining Field-Scale Yields in an Insurance Context
Published: 2020-11-11
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Other Engineering, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Accurately determining crop yields at field-scale can help farmers estimate their net profit, enable insurance companies to ascertain payouts, and when aggregated at regional and national scales, crop yield estimates are critical in ensuring food security. Over the last few decades, crop cuts have been widely used to estimate field-scale crop yields. Crop cuts, while cost prohibitive, are the [...]
Mapping Research Topics at Multiple Levels of Detail
Published: 2020-07-13
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. [...]
A framework to quantify the human footprint in Africa using supply and demand of net primary production
Published: 2020-05-29
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, [...]
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: 2020-04-12
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: 2020-04-12
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 [...]
Individual tree detection and characterization using 3D remote sensing
Published: 2020-04-12
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Here, we will cover individual tree detection and characterization using 3D remote sensing. Simply, it means that point clouds are collected over a forested area using airborne laser scanning (ALS) or created using photogrammetric image interpretation and further used to detect individual trees using different algorithms. After the tree detection, the attributes of interest are predicted for each [...]