Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Water Resource Management
Exploring coastal climate adaptation through storylines: Insights from Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique
Published: 2024-06-11
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Meteorology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Water Resource Management
Coastal settlements, facing increasing flood risk from Tropical Cyclones (TCs) under climate change, need local and detailed climate information for effective adaptation. Analysis of historical events and their impacts provides such information. This study uses storylines to evaluate adaptation strategies, focusing on Cyclone Idai’s impact on Beira, Mozambique, under different climate [...]
HarvestGRID: high-resolution harvested crop areas of the United States from 1981 to 2019
Published: 2024-05-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Life Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The United States is a major producer and exporter of agricultural goods, fulfilling global demands for food, fiber, and fuel while generating substantial economic benefits. Agriculture in the U.S. not only dominates land use but also ranks as the largest water-consuming sector. High-resolution cropland mapping and insights into cultivation trends are essential to enhance sustainable management [...]
Local water year values for the conterminous United States
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Water Resource Management
Quantifying and predicting precipitation and water flow and their influences is challenged by the dynamic relationships between and timing of precipitation and water fluxes. To help with these challenges, scientists use “water year” to examine and predict the impacts of precipitation and relevant extreme climatic and hydrological events on ecosystems. However, traditional water year definitions [...]
Rising temperatures drive lower summer minimum flows across hydrologically diverse catchments in British Columbia
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Excessively low stream flows harm ecosystems and societies, so two key goals of low-flow hydrology are to understand their drivers and to predict their severity and frequency. We show that linear regressions can accomplish both goals across diverse catchments. We analyse 230 unregulated moderate to high relief catchments across rainfall-dominated, hybrid, snowmelt-dominated, and glacial regimes [...]
Limited role of discharge in global river plastic transport
Published: 2024-04-23
Subjects: Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
River plastic transport has been assumed to be driven by river discharge, although observational data does often not support this. We propose a new perspective that describes plastic transport as function of plastic availability and transport capacity. Plastic transport is under most circumstances driven by plastic availability, which is largely disconnected from river discharge. However, when [...]
Wastewaters co-produced with shale gas drive slight regional salinization of groundwater
Published: 2024-04-04
Subjects: Geochemistry, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Water Resource Management
While unconventional oil and gas (UOG) development is changing the world economy, processes that are used during UOG development such as high-volume hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) have been linked with water contamination. Water quality risks include leaks of gas and salty fluids (brines) that are co-produced at wellpads. Identifying the cause of contamination is difficult, however, because [...]
Estimating irrigation water use from remotely sensed evapotranspiration data: Accuracy and uncertainties at field, water right, and regional scales
Published: 2024-02-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Irrigated agriculture is the dominant user of water globally, but most water withdrawals are not monitored or reported. As a result, it is largely unknown when, where, and how much water is used for irrigation. Here, we evaluated the ability of remotely sensed evapotranspiration (ET) data, integrated with other datasets, to calculate irrigation water withdrawals and applications in an intensively [...]
Towards an Open and Integrated Cyberinfrastructure for River Morphology Research in the Big Data Era
Published: 2024-02-16
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Computer Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Systems and Communications, Water Resource Management
The objective of this paper is to present the initial illustration of a cyberinfrastructure named the River MORPhology Information System (RIMORPHIS) that addresses the current limitations related to river morphology data and tools. A new specification for data and semantics on river morphology datasets has been developed to support the web-based platform for discovering and visualization of [...]
Open-source approach for reproducible substrate mapping using semantic segmentation on recreation-grade side scan sonar datasets
Published: 2023-12-21
Subjects: Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Programming Languages and Compilers, Software Engineering, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Knowledge of the variation and distribution of substrates at large spatial extents in aquatic systems, particularly rivers, is severely lacking, impeding species conservation and ecosystem restoration efforts. Air and space-borne remote sensing important for terrestrial and atmospheric measurements are limited in benthic environments due to river stage, turbidity, and canopy cover, requiring [...]
PHOTOMOB: AUTOMATED GIS METHOD FOR ESTIMATION OF FRACTIONAL GRAIN DYNAMICS IN GRAVEL BED RIVERS. PART 1: GRAIN SIZE
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Particle entrainment intensity is spatially and temporally variable, making it a complex phenomenon to measure. This paper is the first of a pair, in which we present an automated image processing procedure (PhotoMOB) for monitoring the mobility/stability of gravel river beds. The method is based on local comparison of the shape of the grains identified at the same coordinates between successive [...]
PhotoMOB: Automated GIS method for estimation of fractional grain dynamics in gravel bed rivers. Part 2: Bed stability and fractional mobility
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Bed mobility and stability are spatially and temporally variable, making it a complex phenomenon to study. This paper is the second of a pair, in which we present an automated image processing procedure for monitoring the mobility/stability of gravel river beds. The method is based on local comparison of the shape of the grains identified at the same coordinates between successive photos to [...]
UMIS: An Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System for Water Quality Resources in the Upper Mississippi River Basin
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Systems and Communications, Water Resource Management
The Upper Mississippi Information System (UMIS) is a cyberinfrastructure framework designed to support large-scale real-time water quality data integration, analysis, and visualization for the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB). UMIS is intended to directly address three of the Grand Challenges for Engineering including: 1) understanding access to clean drinking water, 2) management of the [...]
Looking upstream: analyzing the protection of the drainage area of Amazon rivers
Published: 2023-11-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
In the Amazon, aquatic ecosystems provide essential ecosystem services, including transportation, food, and livelihoods for millions of species. Land use changes and management impact these ecosystem services, and these impacts are not limited to the specific areas where they occur but propagate downstream along the drainage network. However, assessment of the accumulated human footprint upstream [...]
A Deep Learning framework to map riverbed sand mining budgets in large tropical deltas
Published: 2023-10-20
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Sedimentology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Rapid urbanization has dramatically increased the demand for river sand, leading to soaring sand extraction rates that often exceed natural replenishment in many rivers globally. However, our understanding of the geomorphic and social-ecological impacts arising from Sand Mining (SM) remains limited, primarily due to insufficient data on sand extraction rates. Conventionally, bathymetry surveys [...]
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) [...]