Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geographic Information Sciences
Agricultural expansion and intensification in Brazil: A literature synthesis of dynamics, drivers, and implications
Published: 2026-03-24
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
Brazil’s long-term agricultural development reflects a complex interplay between human-driven land-use change and natural ecosystems. Since the 1960s, agricultural production in Brazil has expanded rapidly, driven by global food demand and national economic growth, through two primary pathways: (1) agricultural expansion via conversion of natural vegetation, particularly forests, and (2) [...]
Geospatial Modelling of Vegetation Dynamics and Carbon Sequestration Capacity in Ekiti State, Nigeria Using MODIS Data and CASA Models.
Published: 2026-03-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Accurate estimation of terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity is fundamental to national climate mitigation efforts and achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study assessed vegetation dynamics and modelled Net Primary Productivity (NPP) a proxy for carbon sequestration capacity in Ekiti State, Nigeria, over the 11-year period (2014–2024). The study deployed the seasonal and [...]
Validation of ICESat-2 ATL13 Version 7 Water Surface Elevation on Small High-Latitude Rivers: A Case Study of the River Dee and River Don, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Published: 2026-03-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Satellite Laser Altimetry represents an attractive opportunity to supplement the sparsely distributed in situ gauge network used to monitor rivers. The performance of satellite laser altimetry on small, high latitude streams has however been characterized as being poor. This research will be validating ICESat-2 ATL13 version 7 measured water surface elevations (WSE) for the River Dee (average [...]
Emergent Spatio-Semantic Structure in Large Language Model Embedding Spaces
Published: 2026-02-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Geographic Information Sciences
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in geospatial applications typically as generators of geographic text or as natural language interfaces to spatial data. Here, we explore whether LLM embedding spaces can instead function as geospatial representations that can be exploited directly. Using embeddings extracted from Airbnb property descriptions in London, we show that [...]
Mapping Temperature Deviation and Elderly Vulnerability using Open Source Technology: A One-Week Analysis of Manhattan, New York City
Published: 2026-02-24
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
This paper outlines a research method for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing real-time temperature data for cities using open data and open source technology. The system collects temperature data for each census tract in Manhattan three times daily via the OpenWeather API and stores observations in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. A one-week pilot study (November 15-22, 2025) analyzed 8,990 [...]
Assessing and Correcting Bias in Gridded Reference Evapotranspiration over Agricultural Lands Across the Contiguous United States
Published: 2026-02-19
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Multivariate Analysis, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Water Resource Management
Gridded reference evapotranspiration (ETo) data are widely used for agricultural water management and remote sensing ET (RSET) models, but biases can arise in agricultural regions where coarse-resolution meteorological inputs fail to capture local microclimates. We investigated biases in the gridMET ETo product across irrigated agricultural areas of the contiguous United States (CONUS) by [...]
An Accessible NDVI Classification Tool for Urban and Suburban Vegetation Change Analysis
Published: 2026-01-31
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
This paper presents a web-based research method for studying changes in vegetation in urban and suburban contexts between 2018 and 2024. The system uses the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to analyze imagery for each time period and classify land surface types. After classification, correlation and regression analysis are applied to explain connections between urbanization and [...]
A Benchmark Dataset of Agricultural Weather Stations over the Contiguous United States for Evapotranspiration Applications
Published: 2026-01-17
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Agricultural weather data are fundamental for the accurate estimate of evapotranspiration (ET), irrigation scheduling, and water-use accounting. In particular, reference ET provides a standardized atmospheric demand for water loss from a hypothetical well-watered grass (ETo) or alfalfa (ETr); however, weather stations may not adequately represent such climatic conditions. Weather data commonly [...]
The puzzling yet tractable diversity of global groundwater sustainability challenges
Published: 2025-12-04
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Global groundwater sustainability is a grand challenge that requires diverse approaches to account for local contexts. Yet, global groundwater assessments often focus solely on aggregate physical trends in storage, levels, and fluxes, overlooking the diversity of social-ecological functions provided by groundwater and their associated sustainability challenges. Here, we introduce groundwater [...]
Longitudinal assessment of research in GIScience domain shows a positive impact of reproducible research practices
Published: 2025-12-02
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences
Reproducibility is increasingly recognised as a cornerstone of rigorous science, prompting many publishers to require full documentation, data and software access, and archiving of study materials. Yet prior work shows that such practices, that are essential for communicating research transparently, remain comparatively low in the Geographic Information Science (GIScience) research community. To [...]
Ecosystem extent mapping in a global monitoring context
Published: 2025-10-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
The vital role of ecosystems in maintaining biosphere stability is now recognised globally. Updates in policy frameworks on biodiversity and environmental decline include information on ecosystem extent (EE) as a core assessment indicator, e.g., the Global Biodiversity Framework indicator A2 ‘Extent of natural ecosystems’. The recently proposed System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – [...]
Impact of Land Use and Land Cover Changes on Ecosystem Services: A Multi-Module InVEST-LCM Analysis
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
Land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics influence ecological processes and the provision of essential ecosystem services (ESs). So, understanding how LULC changes influence ESs is critical for sustainable land management and conservation planning, especially in rapidly urbanizing watersheds. Despite studies examining individual ecosystem services, there remains a notable research gap in [...]
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
Multilingual Community Visualizations (MCV): A GIS Dashboard for Linguistic Research and NWS Operations
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The NWS is actively expanding its multilingual outreach to better serve the 68.8 million U.S. individuals who speak a language other than English at home. Among these, 26.3 million individuals with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) are of particular concern, as they often rely entirely on translated forecasts to make life-saving decisions. Yet identifying where these populations are concentrated [...]
Spatiotemporal dynamics of floodplain patterns during the last 400 years south of Leipzig - A regional scale analysis
Published: 2025-06-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Other Earth Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Elster-Pleiße floodplain south of Leipzig has undergone significant hydromorphological changes over the past centuries, influenced by both natural processes and anthropogenic interventions. This study employs high-resolution LiDAR-based fluvial-geomorphological mapping (1x1 m resolution) and old maps analyses to reconstruct past river dynamics and identify shifts in channel morphology. [...]