Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geographic Information Sciences
Productive Rather Than Aesthetic Urban Landscapes Drive Actualized Sustainable Consumption
Published: 2026-05-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations
Global sustainability initiatives prioritize urban greenery to foster resilient cities, yet their efficacy remains under-researched in the Global South. Conventional reliance on self-reported data risks a pervasive “green illusion”— a discrepancy between reported behavior and actual sustainable consumption behavior. To diagnose this anomaly, we synthesize spatial morphology and psychometric [...]
Operationalising EMS-98 Damage Classification: A UAV-to-GIS Pipeline for Macroseismic Survey Support
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Post-earthquake macroseismic surveying often relies on ground-based visual inspections that are slow, costly, and difficult to scale in the immediate aftermath of a seismic event. Deep-learning damage detectors have advanced substantially in recent years, yet their outputs are rarely translated into operational deployment tools that yield a georeferenced dataframe of buildings aligned with the [...]
GEDIMetrics: a QGIS plugin for accessing and integrating multi-product GEDI spaceborne LiDAR data
Published: 2026-05-18
Subjects: Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Management, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) provides near-global, high-resolution 3D LiDAR observations of forest vertical structure. However, GEDI products are distributed as independent HDF5 files organised by beam, requiring ad-hoc workflows for data discovery, quality filtering, spatial subsetting, and footprint-level alignment across products. Existing tools either target a single [...]
Closing the Digital Gap in Nigerian Land Records: An Open-Source QGIS Plugin for Cadastral Survey Archiving and Spatial Management
Published: 2026-05-03
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Secure, retrievable cadastral records are foundational to land tenure security and effective land administration, yet most private cadastral surveying firms in Nigeria maintain survey records exclusively on paper, a structural limitation that prevents spatial querying, concurrent access, and long-term integrity verification across the 50-year archival period required by the Survey Co-ordination [...]
Assessing the impact of Colombian public land acquisitions on forest cover in the Andes
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
Public land acquisitions (PLAs) are a promising conservation instrument, combining the permanence of protected areas with the voluntary, compensatory structure of payments for ecosystem services, yet causal evidence on their effectiveness remains limited. Colombia’s Article 111 mandate, which requires departments to allocate 1% of revenue to land acquisition for watershed protection, has produced [...]
How Do Discrete Global Grid Systems Actually Perform? A Systematic Benchmark Across Geometry, Computation and Relational Joins
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Software Engineering, Spatial Science
As geospatial datasets exceed the billion-row threshold, Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) promise to replace expensive vector spatial joins with fast relational hash-joins on discrete cell identifiers. However, the real-world performance of different grid implementations and the upfront cost of converting vector geometries into grid indexes remains largely unquantified. This paper introduces [...]
Towards Prospective Disaster Risk Management: Mapping Multi-hazard Urban Risk Dynamics Driven by Evolving Exposure and Vulnerability via Earth Observation
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Other Computer Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Risk Analysis, Spatial Science, Structural Engineering
As local governments increasingly adopt geospatial Climate and Disaster Risk Assessment (CDRA) to inform prospective public policy, the reliability of existing static risk intelligence is challenged by the continuous evolution of building exposure, population distribution, and physical vulnerability. Recent multi-temporal datasets of the built environment, derived from Earth Observation and [...]
Prediction of Land Surface Temperature under overcast skies using Data Fusion and Deep Learning approach
Published: 2026-04-12
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Land Surface Temperature (Ts) is an essential input to drive surface energy balance for modelling terrestrial ecosystem processes. It serves as a vital indicator of drought, global change, urban heat islands, public health, and most importantly to understand monsoonal water stress signatures. Thermal InfraRed (TIR) remote sensing is the only source to retrieve Ts. Retrieval of Ts in the tropics [...]
Inverse computational morphology of debris and alluvial fans
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
In mountain areas, debris flows and fluvial transport often build up conical deposits at the confluence between steep tributaries and trunk rivers. The resulting debris and alluvial fans typically exhibit a well-defined relationship between slope or elevation and the distance from the fan apex. This relationship, however, becomes more difficult to characterize when fans are constrained by the [...]
Quantifying the Regional Dynamics and Redistribution of Physical Vulnerability in Least Developed Countries
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Civil Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Other Computer Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Structural Engineering
In the margins of the accelerating development of digital technology worldwide are the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which continually face an exacerbated risk crisis at the intersection of rapid rural-urban growth, underlying physical vulnerability, and intensifying climate hazards. Despite decades of international development commitments, the rate of built-up expansion across LDCs has [...]
Spatial Assessment of Urban Flood Vulnerability in Polk County, Iowa Using a Social–Ecological–Technological Framework
Published: 2026-04-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geographic Information Sciences
Flood impacts are shaped not only by environmental or economic consequences but also by the social, ecological, and infrastructural conditions that influence how communities experience and recover from hazards. This study aims to assess multi-domain flood vulnerability across Polk County, Iowa utilizing a Social–Ecological–Technological Systems (SETS) framework. Eighteen indicators were [...]
Rethinking land take futures: A cellular automata-based spatial planning approach to model urban expansion and densification under divergent growth scenarios
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Spatial Science
Land take - the conversion of greenfield land into built-up areas - poses critical challenges for sustainable urban development. Addressing this issue requires understanding the balance between outward urban expansion and inward urban densification. This study employs a Multinomial Logistic Regression-based Cellular Automata (MNL-CA) model to simulate two different future scenarios of urban [...]
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 [...]