Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Spatial Science
Reflections on the first State of the Map Conference in Malawi
Published: 2025-03-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
State of the Map (SotM) conferences are important events that enable OpenStreetMap (OSM) contributors and users to present and discuss their work. However, when international SotM conferences are held in the Global North countries, participation by African geospatial scientists is not guaranteed due to various barriers, including travel costs and visa restrictions. Conversely, locally held SotM [...]
Understanding Flood Risk in Public Transit Systems: Insights from Accessibility and Vulnerability Analysis in Iowa
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Risk Analysis, Spatial Science, Transportation Engineering
Flooding is a major challenge for urban transportation systems, hindering access to essential services and jobs, especially for vulnerable populations. This study examines the impact of large flood extents on public transportation in Johnson and Linn counties, Iowa, United States, focusing on flood-prone bus routes, reduced service frequency, and access to job locations. Using Geographic [...]
Flood type drives river-scale plastic deposition
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Water Resource Management
Plastic pollution is considered a global environmental challenge, prompting international regulation efforts such as the UN plastic treaty to end plastic pollution. River basins, with high population densities and poor waste management, are particularly exposed to plastic pollution. Floods amplify plastic presence in rivers by mobilizing previously deposited and introduce new plastics. Yet, the [...]
traveltime: an R package to calculate travel time across a landscape from user-specified locations
Published: 2025-02-12
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Spatial Science
Understanding and mapping the time to travel among locations is useful for many activities from urban planning to public health and myriad others. Here we present a software package — traveltime — written in and for the language R. traveltime enables a user to create a map of the motorised or walking travel time over an area of interest from a user-specified set of geographic coordinates. The [...]
Where has all the Sinter gone? From the Pink and White Terraces, the Greatest Tourist Attraction of the Southern Hemisphere
Published: 2025-02-02
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geology, Geomorphology, Other Geography, Paleontology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Stratigraphy, Volcanology
Debate continues over the silica sinter Pink and White Terraces, the greatest tourist attraction of the southern hemisphere. The 1886 Tarawera eruption may or may not have destroyed them by burial or eruption. This research compiles surviving sinter. The volume is unexpectedly tiny, which bears on the debate. A database was developed including photography. A forensic approach was taken to [...]
Site Planning for a Network of Government-operated Weather Stations in the Dominican Republic Using Zonal Statistics from Geospatial Sources, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making, and Neighborhood Analysis
Published: 2024-12-30
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Many weather station networks lack sufficient representativeness, and their station density is often inadequate to capture spatial and climatic variability effectively. Optimal site selection is therefore essential to enhance spatial coverage and improve data quality. This study proposes a methodology for identifying optimal sites for a meteorological station network in the Dominican Republic, [...]
Projecting Global Changes in Land Use and Ecosystem Services Using SEALS (Spatial Economic Allocation Landscape Simulator)
Published: 2024-12-18
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Spatial Science, Statistical Models
Understanding how economic systems and ecosystems interact across space is crucial to ensure societal needs are met without compromising environmental quality. Spatially explicit economic models usually describe human activities and ensuing land-use dynamics at a resolution that this is too coarse (typically 10-1000 regions) to understand how these affect many biophysical processes, including [...]
Sensing the dynamic nature of fragmented croplands in India through earth observation: a comprehensive review
Published: 2024-11-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Fragmentation or the breakdown of landholdings to smaller parcels has an adverse impact on crop yields and productivity because of its uneconomic operational sizes. This comprehensive review reflects the insights into the complex dynamics of small landholding (SLs) in India by leveraging earth observation (EO) based sensing technology through synthesizing existing literature, methodologies and [...]
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 [...]
Seaweed Cultivation: A Cost-Effective Strategy for Food Production in a Global Catastrophe
Published: 2024-08-02
Subjects: Agriculture, Analysis, Life Sciences, Spatial Science
An event such as a large volcanic eruption, nuclear winter or asteroid/comet impact has the potential to seriously reduce incoming sunlight, impacting both the global climate and conventional crop yields. This could have catastrophic impacts on human nutrition, unless the food system can adapt. One possible answer is seaweed, where growth is projected to be less impacted (or even enhanced) by the [...]
Remote sensing and spatial analysis reveal unprecedented cyanobacteria bloom dynamics associated with elephant mass mortality
Published: 2024-05-07
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The 2020 mass mortality of 350 African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in Botswana sparked global concern, with cyanotoxins in watering holes (pans) being a suspected cause, though evidence remains inconclusive. Combining remote sensing and spatial analysis, we examined the relationship between the ecohydrology of ~3,000 pans and the locations of deceased elephants. Our analysis revealed a [...]
Land transformation on multi-decadal timescales reveals expanding croplands and settlements at the expense of tree-covered areas and mangroves in Nigeria
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Evaluating how land-cover is being transformed is essential to identify patterns necessary to infer the change trajectories and the driving factors. This study considers the case of Nigeria, where various natural ecosystems are being converted and for which a current national scale assessment is lacking. Producing Landsat-based time-series, we analyze change among land-cover types (i.e., [...]
Designing and describing climate change impact attribution studies: a guide to common approaches
Published: 2024-01-06
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Public Health, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Impact attribution is an emerging transdisciplinary sub-discipline of detection and attribution, focused on the social, economic, and ecological impacts of climate change. Here, we provide an overview of common end-to-end frameworks in impact attribution, focusing on examples relating to the human health impacts of climate change. We propose a typology of study designs based on whether [...]
Pygoda: a graphical interface to efficiently visualise and explore large sets of geolocated time series
Published: 2023-10-24
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Climate, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Fresh Water Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces, Hydrology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Statistics and Probability, Spatial Science
Modern-day data sets in geosciences may comprise hundreds or thousands of geolocated time series. Despite all the automated tools and new algorithms now available to process and prepare those data before using them in research projects, it can be useful or even necessary to visualise and investigate them manually. Whether it be for data quality assessment, for the preparation of a training data [...]
Mapping the Landscape of Water and Society Research: Promising Combinations of Compatible and Complementary Disciplines
Published: 2023-10-13
Subjects: Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Coupled human-water systems (CHWS) are diverse and have been studied across a wide variety of disciplines. Integrating multiple disciplinary perspectives on CHWS provides a comprehensive and actionable understanding of these complex systems. While interdisciplinary integration has often remained elusive, specific combinations of disciplines might be comparably easier to integrate (compatible) [...]