Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geographic Information Sciences
How Rural Is Rural? Agreement Between the FARS Rural/Urban Label and 2020 Census Urban Areas for U.S. Traffic Deaths, 2015–2024
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Spatial Science, Transportation Engineering
U.S. rural road safety statistics, including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s annual rural/urban fatality reports, classify each fatal crash by the rural/urban variable (RUR_URB) in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Population research, in contrast, usually defines rural with the Census Bureau’s urban areas. We measure how well the two definitions agree for every [...]
Beyond the SCL: threshold optimization of Cloud Probability and Cloud Score+ for cloud and shadow masking in Sentinel-2 imagery using CloudSEN12
Published: 2026-10-27
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Cloud and cloud shadow contamination remains a major source of uncertainty in Sentinel-2 imagery. The native Scene Classification Layer (SCL) frequently exhibits high omission errors and offers no threshold flexibility, whereas Cloud Probability (CP) and Cloud Score+ (CS+) provide continuous, user-adjustable scores. However, no consensus exists on their optimal thresholds, and their capacity for [...]
Flood Exposure Assessment of Electrical Substations in Iowa Using Geospatial Service-Area and Influence-Zone Modeling
Published: 2026-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geographic Information Sciences
Flooding poses a growing risk to electric substations, yet statewide assessments often fail to connect facility exposure with the spatial context of service territories, communities, built environments, and grid infrastructure. This study develops a data-driven geospatial framework to assess direct and indirect flood impacts on electrical substations across Iowa under 50-, 100-, and 500-year [...]
Municipal exposure to sea-level-rise inundation in Connecticut: a reproducible screening analysis of NOAA inundation-extent data and its sensitivity to methodological choices
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geographic Information Sciences, Oceanography, Physical and Environmental Geography
Municipal tabulations of sea-level-rise exposure are widely used in coastal planning, but they are sensitive to processing choices that are rarely reported. We tabulated NOAA Office for Coastal Management ocean-connected inundation-extent rasters for Connecticut (0.5–10 ft above mean higher high water, MHHW; ~3 m resolution from 2023 statewide lidar) for all 169 municipalities, using 2020 Census [...]
Ecological compression of vegetation information in wildfire spread prediction: a case study of the 2020 Brattain Fire
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Broad fuel categories simplify mapped vegetation, but it is unclear whether the distinctions removed help predict wildfire spread. We examined whether vegetation composition improved prediction of the next observed fire-growth interval and measured the information lost by grouping fuel models. Using the 2020 Brattain Fire in Oregon, we compared baseline predictors describing fire state, terrain, [...]
ConLoRA-Sat: Parameter-Efficient Synthetic Satellite Imagery Generation for Data-Scarce Humanitarian Contexts
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Computer Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Data scarcity constrains Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in regions such as the Horn of Africa. One example is United Nations peacekeeping training, which needs fictitious yet geographically plausible terrain rather than identifiable real locations. This article presents ConLoRA-Sat, a framework that generates satellite imagery with controllable land cover, together with a segmentation [...]
The Spatial Journey: A Visual Narrative of the Keffi to Makurdi Field Trip
Published: 2026-10-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Outdoor Education, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Background: Field-based education is a critical academic component in geographical studies, designed to bridge theoretical knowledge with empirical observation. This paper reports on the development of a visual and interactive geospatial narrative based on a five-day geography educational field trip from Keffi to Makurdi, Nigeria, from the 26th to the 30th of August 2024. Objective: The primary [...]
Parcel-Level Deforestation Hazard Rates in the Paraguayan Chaco: A Multi-Scale Empirical Analysis of Annual Clearing Dynamics on Large Cattle Ranches
Published: 2026-10-04
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Cattle ranch expansion across the Paraguayan Chaco generates parcel-level clearing rates that appear inconsistent with regional deforestation statistics, raising concerns that REDD+ baselines constructed from proxy parcels overstate forest loss (a baseline over-crediting debate that turns on denominator consistency between parcel hazard and regional flows). Because parcels undergoing active [...]
Local ETM+ to OLI EVI Harmonisation in Tropical Forest Environments
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
This report evaluates ETM+ to OLI EVI harmonisation in tropical forest environments us-ing 8,988,291 paired observations. Results show strong linear correspondence but substan-tial acquisition-to-acquisition variability. The empirical relationship differs markedly from the CONUS-derived framework of Roy et al. (2016), indicating that its direct application is not supported under the investigated [...]
GeoAgent: An Agent-Based QGIS Plugin for Natural-Language-Driven Geospatial Analysis with Multi-Backend Large Language Model Support
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Geographic Information Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Spatial Science
Geospatial analysis is essential across the earth and environmental sciences, yet conventional geographic information systems (GIS) rely on a procedure-oriented paradigm that demands substantial operational expertise. We present GeoAgent, an open-source QGIS plugin that enables goal-driven geospatial workflows through natural language conversation powered by large language models (LLMs). GeoAgent [...]
Recent Changes in Lake Chad’s Surface Water Extent: A Remote Sensing Assessment Using Sentinel-2 Land Cover Data (2017-2025)
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Lake Chad is an endorheic freshwater lake located at the junction of four countries; Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon in West-Central Africa. Lake Chad, once one of Africa’s largest freshwater bodies, has experienced significant hydrological fluctuations over the past decades. While long-term historical analyses highlight a severe 90% surface area contraction since the 1960s, short-term [...]
Geodesic Location–Allocation for Liquefaction Investigation Coverage in Uttarakhand, India
Published: 2026-09-20
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Site-scale liquefaction investigations in Uttarakhand are concentrated in the Roorkee–Haridwar and Rudrapur–Khatima corridors. This article asks a narrower, operational question: where should a limited reconnaissance programme investigate next to reduce geographic gaps in that evidence? Fifteen settlement-centred nodes were represented as a complete weighted graph, with four literature-supported [...]
Was the Pre-Event SWIR Anomaly at Tsangbu Ri a Genuine Glacier-Collapse Precursor? A Calibrated Multi-Glacier Test of the 2026 Case
Published: 2026-09-19
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Geographic Information Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Hydrology, Planetary Geology, Planetary Glaciology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Tectonics and Structure
On 26 August 2026 a compound bedrock-and-glacier failure on the northern flank of the Langtang Lirung–Tsangbu Ri (Kimshung) massif, Nepal–China border, generated a rock–ice avalanche and a catastrophic downstream flood along the Bhotekoshi–Trishuli river system. A pre-event Sentinel-2 shortwave-infrared (SWIR2–NIR–Red) composite (12 August 2026) shows a sharply bounded, strongly saturated [...]
Cloud Cover and Structural Observation Gaps in African Agricultural Earth Observation: Evidence from Six Agroecological Zones
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Optical Earth observation underpins a growing number of agricultural-monitoring and agri-fintech services across Africa, all of which need a usable view of a field often enough to track its condition. Cloud gaps in that record are usually treated as random missing data; we test whether they are instead structurally biased. Using three growing seasons (2022–2024) of Sentinel-2 scene-classification [...]
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 [...]