Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical and Environmental Geography
BORDER OPTICS : Satellite Verification of India's Vibrant Villages Programme: A Compositing-Window Robustness Assessment of Border-Village Development
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ask the Government of India if things have worked out for them with their flagship scheme for the Border Villages, the honest answer (on parliamentary record) is No, it has never been verified anywhere. The Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP-I) has approved around ₹4,800 crore in support of 2,967 villages in five Himalayan border states/union territories including 662 villages marked 'priority' for [...]
Independent Verification of the European Climate Law's Effect on Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution: A Satellite-Derived, Difference-in-Differences Analysis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, International and Area Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
Testing the European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) against a deliberately constructed external control group of nine non-EU countries (the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia), using a two-group Difference-in-Differences (DiD) model with country-clustered standard errors on a 36-country panel, produces [...]
ECOCIDE: Quantifying War-Time Environmental Damage: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Kakhovka Dam Destruction
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Abstract: International law organisations are actively looking into declaring "ecocide" -- mass environmental destruction -- as a prosecutable international crime and in September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a proposed amendment to Rome Statute. No consistent, statistically sound method yet has been developed to document such a claim of harm, however, because prior environmental [...]
Landslide Susceptibility Modelling and Infrastructure Exposure in the Zillertal, Austrian Alps
Published: 2026-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Landslides are a major threat in alpine regions, as steep terrain, complex geology and locally concentrated infrastructure increase societal exposure to landslide hazards. This study develops a landslide susceptibility model for the Zillertal (Tyrol, Austria), utilizing a Random Forest modelling approach. A high-resolution landslide susceptibility map was created using seven geomorphometric, [...]
Integrated soil profile mapping reveals regional patterns of soil condition across Southern African agricultural lands
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Statistics, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Statistical Models
Soil information at regional scales remains limited in Africa despite its importance for sustainable agricultural management, food security and land degradation assessment. Existing digital soil mapping approaches commonly model soil properties as independent depth layers and apply depth harmonisation after prediction, limiting their capacity to characterise changes in soil condition. Here, we [...]
Counting the Solomon Islands: How Many Islands Does the Archipelago Actually Contain?
Published: 2026-08-17
Subjects: Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Solomon Islands is widely reported to comprise approximately 900--1,000 islands, a figure repeated across government, tourism, and encyclopedic sources without a traceable methodology. We re-examine this figure using two independent, reproducible geospatial datasets: the USGS/Esri/UNEP-WCMC Global Islands database (30 m Landsat-derived classification) and OpenStreetMap (OSM) land polygon data [...]
Annual high-resolution global ambient population estimates from 1975 to 2024
Published: 2026-08-13
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
Gridded population data support assessments of human exposure, settlement change, infrastructure demand, and access to services, yet global datasets combining annual coverage over multiple decades with fine spatial resolution remain limited. LandScan Mosaic Time Series provides 50 annual estimates of global ambient population distribution at 3 arc-second resolution from 1975 through 2024. The [...]
Designing decision-centric early warning systems for climate tipping points: the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre as a test case
Published: 2026-08-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography
Early warning systems (EWS) for climate tipping point must support decisions to be useful. Using the potential near-term Subpolar Gyre tipping point as a test case, we develop a pre-elicitation framework linking Earth System science with decision-making. We show that no single EWS can meet diverse decision needs. Instead, the framework identifies shared decision architectures and information [...]
A novel integrated assessment framework to inform Australia's net zero transition
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Australia has set an ambitious goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Attaining this target will require important transformations across multiple sectors of the economy. Integrated assessment models can provide valuable insights into the interactions across sectors of the economy, including land, agriculture and energy, to guide these complex transformations. However, many [...]
Thermal migration and climatic de-territorialisation of North American professional sports leagues, 1950–2025
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography
Over the past seven decades, the four major North American professional sports leagues (NHL, MLB, NBA, NFL) have expanded and relocated across the continent, shifting their collective geography towards the Sun Belt. We quantify the climatic consequences of this movement by combining the complete franchise location history of the four leagues from 1950 to 2025 with ERA5-Land reanalysis data and [...]
A pipeline for representing buildings as fuels in wildland urban fire spread and risk modeling
Published: 2026-07-10
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Mechanical Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Mechanical Engineering, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical and Environmental Geography, Risk Analysis, Software Engineering, Spatial Science
Wildfires pose an increasing risk to structures and communities located adjacent to or among vegetative landscapes. Yet most open landscape-scale fire modeling workflows still lack a reproducible way to represent buildings as combustible fuels rather than only as exposed assets or nonburnable developed land. This paper presents FireDX, a geospatial data engine that generates standardized, [...]
Quantifying Trail-Induced Fragmentation in Protected Natural Areas Using Large-Scale GPS Trajectory Analysis
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography
Protected areas are essential for biodiversity conservation, but recreational activities can fragment habitats through trail networks. This study quantifies trail-induced fragmentation across all protected area types in Switzerland using a novel computational pipeline combining fastgeotoolkit for GPS trajectory processing and GeoPandas for spatial analysis. 3,136 hiking GPS tracks (29,563 km [...]
Underestanding Tipping Points Caused by Climate Change in Iran: A review
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Climate tipping points are caused by global warming and refer to critical thresholds in the climate system, crossing which leads to irreversible changes in climate conditions, ecosystems, and even socio-economic structures. These changes may occur over long time scales, ranging from several decades to hundreds of years, and their effects are often negative and threatening, although some positive [...]
A scoping review to map research gaps and opportunities relating to heat-related health hazards in countries surrounding Lake Victoria, Africa.
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Public Health, Physical and Environmental Geography, Sustainability
Urban populations in sub-Saharan Africa are at rising risks of climate-related health hazards due to global climate change and uncontrolled rapid urbanization. Despite the increasing recognition of these challenges, the extent to which urban climates impact health outcomes in Africa remains poorly understood. East African countries surrounding the Lake Victoria Basin (Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, [...]
Dress Rehearsal: 2023 El Niño Anticipatory Action Somalia, in the Shadow of 1997
Published: 2026-06-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Meteorology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography
In 2023 Somalia saw the largest-ever scale of anticipatory action (AA) linked to a seasonal forecast. $24m was spent on preparedness and early response, based on forecasted flooding driven by El Niño and a positiveIn 2023 Somalia saw the largest-ever scale of anticipatory action (AA) linked to a seasonal forecast. $24m was spent on preparedness and early response, based on forecasted flooding [...]