Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geographic Information Sciences
Enhancing the Normalized Difference Water Index for Improved Urban Flood Detection
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Other Earth Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Accurate urban flood detection is crucial for effective disaster management and urban planning. Traditional indices like the Normalized Difference Water Index and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index often produce inaccurate results due to spectral confusion in urban areas and sensitivity to shadows. Moreover, MNDWI's reliance on the Shortwave Infrared band limits its use with certain [...]
Understanding Compound Climate Hazards and Exposure from a Spatial Perspective: A Case Study for the Dosso Region, Niger
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Compound climate hazards—where extreme events co-occur— pose increasing risks to our socio-ecological systems, yet their spatial dynamics remain poorly understood. We introduce a novel metric to quantify simultaneous drought and heatwave exposure, applying it to Niger’s Dosso region over a 24-year period (2000–2023) using remote sensing and GIS-based techniques. Our analysis reveals distinct [...]
locationallocation: solving Maximal Coverage Location-Allocation geospatial infrastructure assessment and planning problems
Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Geographic Information Sciences, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Spatial Science
Assessing and planning infrastructure and networks over space conditional to a spatially distributed demand and with consideration of accessibility and spatial justice goals and under infrastructure allocation constraints is a key policy objective. Potential applications extend to the domains of public infrastructure assessment and planning (public services provision, e.g. transport, social [...]
A Data-Driven Method for Improving Historical Maps' Positional Accuracy
Published: 2025-03-16
Subjects: Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Other Engineering
Positional accuracy improvement (PAI) of historical maps involves correcting their inherent geometric distortions, which often limit their usability in modern applications. Although resurveying an entire map provides the most accurate solution for PAI, it is costly, time-consuming, and often impossible. This study proposes a cost-effective, alternative data-driven method, using Generalized [...]
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 geoscientists 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 [...]
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, [...]
Global drivers of forest loss at 1 km resolution
Published: 2024-12-20
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Forests are in decline worldwide due to human activities such as agricultural expansion, urbanization, and mineral extraction. Forest loss due to generally temporary causes, such as wildfire and forest management, is important to distinguish from permanent land use conversion due to the differing ecological and climate impacts of these disturbances and for the purposes of developing effective [...]
Advancing vegetation monitoring with virtual laser scanning of dynamic scenes (VLS-4D): Opportunities, implementations and future perspectives
Published: 2024-10-07
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Virtual Laser Scanning (VLS) is an established and valuable research tool in forestry and ecology, widely used to simulate labelled LiDAR point cloud data for sensitivity analysis, model training and method testing. In VLS, vegetation has traditionally been modelled as static, neglecting the influence of vegetation dynamics on LiDAR point cloud representations and limiting applications to [...]
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 [...]
River Morphology Information System: A Web Cyberinfrastructure for Advancing River Morphology Research
Published: 2024-05-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Databases and Information Systems, Geographic Information Sciences, Software Engineering
The study and management of river systems are increasingly challenged by the complexity and volume of data required to understand and predict river morphology changes. The River Morphology Information System (RIMORPHIS) is introduced as a transformative solution to these challenges, serving as an open-access web-based cyberinfrastructure designed to enable advanced research in river morphology [...]
The Challenges of Line Buffers: Issues and Methods
Published: 2024-02-15
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences
This paper discusses the challenges of flat-cap and other linestring buffers, emphasizing automated applications. The pitfalls of existing implementations are introduced, stemming from the lack of a satisfactory flat-cap buffer definition. The buffers’ roots in computational geometry are explored. Several candidate methods for robust buffer construction are described, and a novel method is [...]
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., [...]