Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical and Environmental Geography
Social Vulnerability and Climate Risk Assessment for Agricultural Communities in The United States
Published: 2023-08-18
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Risk Analysis, Spatial Science
Floods and droughts significantly affect agricultural activities and pose a threat to food security by subsequently reducing agricultural production. The impact of flood events is distributed disproportionately among agricultural communities based on their socio-economic fabric. Understanding climate-related hazards is critical for planning mitigation measures to secure vulnerable communities. [...]
Spatiotemporal inconsistencies in Landsat satellite observations bias environmental-change analyses and monitoring
Published: 2023-05-19
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
Satellite remote sensing is vital for research, monitoring, and policy addressing environmental-change and sustainability issues from climate and ecosystem changes to food and water security. Here, Landsat satellite data play a crucial role, thanks to their unique global, long-term, and high-resolution coverage. Yet, spatial and temporal data gaps in the Landsat archive may propagate into derived [...]
Calling for a National Model Benchmarking Facility
Published: 2023-04-14
Subjects: Biology, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Life Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Systems Biology
The modern world uses predictive computer models for many important purposes, including weather predictions, epidemic management, flood forecasting and warnings, and economic policymaking. We need to know how much we can trust the projections of these models, not only to achieve more accurate projections for systems, but also to undertake scientific learning about systems by incrementally testing [...]
A high-resolution temporal framework to understand the reach-scale controls on wood budgeting
Published: 2023-04-07
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Large active channels usually store more wood than channels with a narrow flow because of the availability of large unvegetated bars for wood deposition and inner functioning that usually supplies more wood through channel shifting. However, the dynamics of the wood supply (wood input, output, or stability) can vary substantially over time and the drivers are largely unknown. To explore them, we [...]
Rapid seaward expansion of seaport footprints worldwide
Published: 2023-02-25
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
As global maritime traffic increases, seaports grow to accommodate and compete for higher volumes of trade throughput. However, growth trajectories of seaport footprints around the world have gone unmeasured, likely because of a lack of readily available spatio-temporal data. Here, we use geospatial analysis of global satellite imagery from 1990–2020 to show that 65 seaports among the world's top [...]
Did hydroclimate conditions contribute to the political dynamics of Majapahit? A preliminary analysis
Published: 2023-02-21
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Majapahit was the largest Hindu-Buddhist empire that ruled the Indonesian archipelago from the late 13th to mid-16th centuries CE. Only now there is still a lot of history surrounding the Majapahit era that has yet to be revealed. One is about how environmental factors influenced the political dynamics at that time. This study tries to discuss the influence of hydroclimate regimes using the Paleo [...]
Reconstructing Rotomahana Basin topography to disclose the lost White Terraces─ New Zealand’s Eighth Wonder of the World
Published: 2022-07-05
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Stratigraphy, Volcanology
The greatest geoscience and tourist attractions in the southern hemisphere were the Pink and White Terraces, the lost Eighth Wonder of the World. British, American and European tourists bypassed local calcareous terraces, for the sea voyage to New Zealand where the siliceous terraces astonished a global audience. Their allure remains. In 1886, the Mount Tarawera eruption buried the terraces. They [...]
Developing seagrass index for long term monitoring of Zostera japonica seagrass bed: a case study in Yellow River Delta, China
Published: 2022-06-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Seagrass beds offer unique and vital ecological services as an important blue carbon ecosystem in coastal wetlands. Zostera japonica is an intertidal seagrass species native to eastern Asia and is one of the most widely distributed seagrass species in China. However, little is known on the long-term variations of Z. japonica extents. Automatic mapping method for Z. japonica seagrass beds is in [...]
Global biomass fires and infant mortality
Published: 2022-04-16
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Global outdoor biomass burning is a major contributor to air pollution, especially in low and middle-income countries. Recent years have witnessed substantial changes in the extent of biomass burning, including large declines in Africa. However, direct evidence on the contribution of biomass burning to global health outcomes remains limited. Here we use georeferenced data on more than 2 million [...]
Analyzing the uncertainty of the CORINE Land Cover time series (1990-2018) for Spain
Published: 2022-02-10
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
CORINE Land Cover is one of the most relevant Land Use Cover (LUC) databases in Europe because of its degree of detail and long time series. Although some studies have assessed the uncertainty of the database for specific years and periods, no work has been found that analyses all the available CORINE time series (1990-2018). In this study, we analyze the uncertainties of the CORINE time series [...]
A scalable framework for quantifying field-level agricultural carbon outcomes
Published: 2022-01-01
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Agriculture contributes nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which is motivating interest in certain farming practices that have the potential to reduce GHG emissions or sequester carbon in soil. The related GHG emission (including N2O and CH4) and changes in soil carbon stock are defined here as “agricultural carbon outcomes”. Accurate quantification of agricultural carbon [...]
Evidences of horizontal urban heat advection in London using 6 years of data from a citizen weather station network
Published: 2021-12-05
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography
Recent advances in citizen weather station (CWS) networks, with data accessible via crowd-sourcing, provide relevant climatic information to urban scientists and decision makers. In particular, CWS can provide long-term measurements of urban heat and valuable information on spatio-temporal heterogeneity related to horizontal heat advection. In this study, we make the first compilation of a [...]
Geographically-resolved social cost of anthropogenic emissions accounting for both direct and climate-mediated effects
Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Sustainability
The magnitude and distribution of physical and societal impacts from long-lived greenhouse gases are insensitive to the emission source location; the same is not true for major co-emitted short-lived pollutants like aerosols. Here we combine novel global climate model simulations with established response functions to show that identical aerosols emitted from different regions (Brazil, China, [...]
Climate change, fire return intervals and the growing risk of permanent forest loss in boreal Eurasia
Published: 2021-11-15
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Climate change has driven an increase in the frequency and severity of fires in Eurasian boreal forests. A growing number of field studies have linked the change in fire regime to post-fire recruitment failure and permanent forest loss. In this study we used four burnt area and two forest loss datasets to calculate the landscape-scale fire return interval (FRI) and associated risk of permanent [...]
Optimizing nature-based solutions by combining social equity, hydro-environmental performance, and economic costs through a novel Gini coefficient
Published: 2021-11-15
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Engineering
A robust multi-functional framework for widespread planning of nature-based solutions (NBS) must incorporate components of social equity and hydro-environmental performance in a cost-effective manner. NBS systems address stormwater mitigation by increasing on-site infiltration and evaporation through enhanced greenspace while also improving various components of societal well-being, such as [...]