Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Spatial Science
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 [...]
GEDIMetrics: a QGIS plugin for accessing and integrating multi-product GEDI spaceborne LiDAR data
Published: 2026-05-18
Subjects: Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Management, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) provides near-global, high-resolution 3D LiDAR observations of forest vertical structure. However, GEDI products are distributed as independent HDF5 files organised by beam, requiring ad-hoc workflows for data discovery, quality filtering, spatial subsetting, and footprint-level alignment across products. Existing tools either target a single [...]
Calibrated spatial uncertainty for Earth observation foundation models via Matérn-motivated latent stochastic regularization
Published: 2026-05-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Earth observation foundation models produce dense spatial embeddings that support transfer learning across sensors and regions, yet these representations carry no explicit spatial statistical model for covariance, smoothness, or uncertainty. Existing deep learning uncertainty methods produce per-pixel variance estimates that ignore spatial dependence, and their calibration is rarely assessed [...]
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 [...]
How Do Discrete Global Grid Systems Actually Perform? A Systematic Benchmark Across Geometry, Computation and Relational Joins
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Software Engineering, Spatial Science
As geospatial datasets exceed the billion-row threshold, Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) promise to replace expensive vector spatial joins with fast relational hash-joins on discrete cell identifiers. However, the real-world performance of different grid implementations and the upfront cost of converting vector geometries into grid indexes remains largely unquantified. This paper introduces [...]
Towards Prospective Disaster Risk Management: Mapping Multi-hazard Urban Risk Dynamics Driven by Evolving Exposure and Vulnerability via Earth Observation
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Other Computer Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Risk Analysis, Spatial Science, Structural Engineering
As local governments increasingly adopt geospatial Climate and Disaster Risk Assessment (CDRA) to inform prospective public policy, the reliability of existing static risk intelligence is challenged by the continuous evolution of building exposure, population distribution, and physical vulnerability. Recent multi-temporal datasets of the built environment, derived from Earth Observation and [...]
Soil-informed multivariate decision support to assess urban ecosystem service potential
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Dynamical Systems, Multivariate Analysis, Natural Resources and Conservation, Remote Sensing, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Theory and Algorithms
Metropolitan expansion across Africa requires robust soil information to support ecosystem services and urban resilience. However, digital soil mapping often prioritises predictive accuracy over identifying where information is reliable for decision making. This study evaluated numerical and South African Soil Taxonomy within a decision framework to assess where ecosystem service inferences can [...]
Prediction of Land Surface Temperature under overcast skies using Data Fusion and Deep Learning approach
Published: 2026-04-12
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Land Surface Temperature (Ts) is an essential input to drive surface energy balance for modelling terrestrial ecosystem processes. It serves as a vital indicator of drought, global change, urban heat islands, public health, and most importantly to understand monsoonal water stress signatures. Thermal InfraRed (TIR) remote sensing is the only source to retrieve Ts. Retrieval of Ts in the tropics [...]
Quantifying the Regional Dynamics and Redistribution of Physical Vulnerability in Least Developed Countries
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Civil Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Other Computer Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Structural Engineering
In the margins of the accelerating development of digital technology worldwide are the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which continually face an exacerbated risk crisis at the intersection of rapid rural-urban growth, underlying physical vulnerability, and intensifying climate hazards. Despite decades of international development commitments, the rate of built-up expansion across LDCs has [...]
Rethinking land take futures: A cellular automata-based spatial planning approach to model urban expansion and densification under divergent growth scenarios
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Spatial Science
Land take - the conversion of greenfield land into built-up areas - poses critical challenges for sustainable urban development. Addressing this issue requires understanding the balance between outward urban expansion and inward urban densification. This study employs a Multinomial Logistic Regression-based Cellular Automata (MNL-CA) model to simulate two different future scenarios of urban [...]
City-level temperature reduction from street green space by city typology and climate zone
Published: 2026-03-29
Subjects: Climate, Human Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Vegetation in the street can lower temperatures at neighbourhood level and reduce heat stress for pedestrians. Street green spaces (SGS) is thus an urgently needed nature-based solution for adapting to a warming climate, and also has some ability for carbon uptake. This local solution has global potential, but the cooling potential of street green space depends on local context, urban form and [...]
Agricultural expansion and intensification in Brazil: A literature synthesis of dynamics, drivers, and implications
Published: 2026-03-24
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
Brazil’s long-term agricultural development reflects a complex interplay between human-driven land-use change and natural ecosystems. Since the 1960s, agricultural production in Brazil has expanded rapidly, driven by global food demand and national economic growth, through two primary pathways: (1) agricultural expansion via conversion of natural vegetation, particularly forests, and (2) [...]
Geospatial Modelling of Vegetation Dynamics and Carbon Sequestration Capacity in Ekiti State, Nigeria Using MODIS Data and CASA Models.
Published: 2026-03-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Accurate estimation of terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity is fundamental to national climate mitigation efforts and achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study assessed vegetation dynamics and modelled Net Primary Productivity (NPP) a proxy for carbon sequestration capacity in Ekiti State, Nigeria, over the 11-year period (2014–2024). The study deployed the seasonal and [...]
Validation of ICESat-2 ATL13 Version 7 Water Surface Elevation on Small High-Latitude Rivers: A Case Study of the River Dee and River Don, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Published: 2026-03-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Satellite Laser Altimetry represents an attractive opportunity to supplement the sparsely distributed in situ gauge network used to monitor rivers. The performance of satellite laser altimetry on small, high latitude streams has however been characterized as being poor. This research will be validating ICESat-2 ATL13 version 7 measured water surface elevations (WSE) for the River Dee (average [...]
Wildfire house loss hazard mapping and fuel management scenario planning on a Tasmanian wildland-urban interface using radiant heat and firebrand exposure modelling
Published: 2026-03-03
Subjects: Forest Management, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Globally, wildfire disasters are increasing in frequency through a combination of urban expansion into flammable wildlands and climate change. Accordingly, the wildland urban interface (WUI) is a crucial geographic domain for disaster risk reduction. Accurate mapping of wildfire house loss hazard is a basic requirement for effective wildfire risk management. We developed a novel geographic [...]