Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geographic Information Sciences
Foundational GIS competence, cognitive demand and essay-response maturity in the Finnish geography matriculation examination
Published: 2026-06-22
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Science and Mathematics Education
This study analyses how upper secondary students demonstrate foundational GIS competence in essay responses to a Finnish geography matriculation examination. A random sample of 100 Finnish-language responses was examined using qualitative deductive content analysis, the revised Bloom’s taxonomy, the SOLO taxonomy, and the GeoTAITO model. The task addressed geographic information, spatial [...]
Pedagogical integration of digital GIS tools in secondary education: Teachers’ uses, classroom organisation, and constraints
Published: 2026-06-22
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography
This study examines how geography teachers implement GIS-related digital work in secondary education and what this reveals about the pedagogical integration of specialised digital tools. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 Finnish lower and upper secondary geography teachers, the study analyses the tools teachers use, the pedagogical organisation of GIS-related work, and the factors [...]
How Do General Upper Secondary School Students Interpret Map Information? Geomedia Literacy and Visual Map Elements in Finland’s Geography Matriculation Examination
Published: 2026-06-22
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Language and Literacy Education
This study examines general upper secondary school students’ geomedia literacy in a high-stakes assessment context by analysing 272 essay answers to a map-related question in Finland’s nationwide geography Matriculation Examination (spring 2020). The task (“Vis-ual elements of a good map”) asked students to identify at least five map elements and justify what each element conveys using a provided [...]
Mangrove Loss and Growing Coastal Flood Exposure in East Malaysia: A Multi-Decadal Analysis with Sea Level Rise Projections
Published: 2026-06-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Mangrove forests provide critical coastal flood protection, yet their ongoing loss in combination with sea level rise creates a compounding exposure dynamic that remains poorly quantified at sub-national scale across Southeast Asia. This study presents the first systematic, multi-decadal analysis of mangrove loss and coastal flood exposure change for the 10 km coastal buffer of East Malaysia [...]
Two decades of kilometer-scale daily PM2.5 from satellite observations and machine learning reveal geographically diverging exposure in Ghana
Published: 2026-06-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a major contributor to global burden of disease, yet air quality data remain sparse in many low- and middle-income countries, limiting nationwide monitoring and effective policy development. We address this gap by developing a high-resolution gridded (1 km × 1 km) dataset for daily surface PM2.5 concentrations in Ghana from 2005 to 2025 by training [...]
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: 2026-05-01
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, have [...]
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: 2026-04-09
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: 2026-04-09
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 [...]