Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geographic Information Sciences
ECOCIDE: Quantifying War-Time Environmental Damage: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Kakhovka Dam Destruction
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Abstract: International law organisations are actively looking into declaring "ecocide" -- mass environmental destruction -- as a prosecutable international crime and in September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a proposed amendment to Rome Statute. No consistent, statistically sound method yet has been developed to document such a claim of harm, however, because prior environmental [...]
Independent Verification of the European Climate Law's Effect on Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution: A Satellite-Derived, Difference-in-Differences Analysis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, International and Area Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
Satellite observations make it easy to compare air pollution in countries that adopted a policy with countries that did not. This paper examines what such a comparison identifies. It uses Sentinel-5P TROPOMI tropospheric NO₂ for 2019–2024 and a country-level difference-in-differences (DiD) model of the European Climate Law that compares the EU-27 with nine neighbouring non-EU countries. NO₂ fell [...]
The Vulnerability Spiral: Compound Climate Risk Across Five Islands
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Hydrology, International and Area Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Sustainability
Low islands face two threats at once: the sea rising, and the reefs and mangroves that buffer it weakening. I measured both across 5 island groups in 3 ocean basins (Maldives, Lakshadweep, Seychelles, Fiji and the Canary Islands), testing mangroves and coral reefs as separate pathways. Exposure is the share of people (WorldPop 2020) living on land at or below 1 m, on a bare earth elevation model [...]
Testing the Fluorescence Advantage: Solar-Induced Fluorescence as an Early Indicator of Agricultural Drought Stress in Marathwada, Maharashtra
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
India uses rainfall deficits and vegetation indices such as NDVI to declare drought, and PMFBY crop-insurance payouts depend on these declarations. Solar-Induced Fluorescence (SIF) is linked to photosynthesis, so many expect it to show drought stress earlier than NDVI. I tested this in the eight districts of Marathwada, Maharashtra, over nine Kharif seasons (2015–2023). I compared [...]
Ghost Infrastructure: Historical Industrial Geography and the Persistence of Path-Dependent Accessibility in Bochum, Germany
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
The complete 69,393 pedestrian street node network from Bochum was used for a Welch's t-test, which revealed as a surprise that street nodes with low accessibility are actually significantly farther from historical industrial sites than street nodes with high accessibility (t=42.887, p<0.00001, Cohen's d=0.589 - medium-to-large effect), which is the opposite of what the original hypothesis [...]
Stolen Strata: Quantifying the Anthropogenic Erasure of Kashmir's Karewa Terraces and Its Threat to the Saffron Economy
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Karewa tablelands are the flat-topped, scarp-bounded remnants of the old lake and river deposits of the Kashmir Valley. Reporting from Kashmir has said for years that they are being dug away for brick clay and fill, but I did not find a satellite measurement of how much, where and when. This study asks three questions: how much karewa tableland that was vegetated in 2013–2015 is no longer [...]
Landslide Susceptibility Modelling and Infrastructure Exposure in the Zillertal, Austrian Alps
Published: 2026-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Landslides are a major threat in alpine regions, as steep terrain, complex geology and locally concentrated infrastructure increase societal exposure to landslide hazards. This study develops a landslide susceptibility model for the Zillertal (Tyrol, Austria), utilizing a Random Forest modelling approach. A high-resolution landslide susceptibility map was created using seven geomorphometric, [...]
Global Power Outage Detection at the Kilometer Scale from Satellite Nighttime Lights
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Power and Energy, Public Health, Remote Sensing
Satellite nighttime light observations show great promise for remote sensing of power outages, yet have only been utilized in limited case studies to date. Here, we present generalized detection of power outages across the globe at ~1-kilometer resolution. Our method, the Outage frameWork for Luminosity Interruptions (OWL-I), reveals the power outages can be reliably detected from VIIRS/Black [...]
Integrated soil profile mapping reveals regional patterns of soil condition across Southern African agricultural lands
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Statistics, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Statistical Models
Soil information at regional scales remains limited in Africa despite its importance for sustainable agricultural management, food security and land degradation assessment. Existing digital soil mapping approaches commonly model soil properties as independent depth layers and apply depth harmonisation after prediction, limiting their capacity to characterise changes in soil condition. Here, we [...]
Spatial Recognition Justice: Integrating Participatory Mapping and Discrete Choice Experiment to Elicit Ecosystem Service Values
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Spatial Science
Nature-based solutions (NBS) have become a central component of climate adaptation and sustainability agendas in many cities. Yet NBS implementation increasingly faces opposition from residents. As NBS fail to consider diverse needs, values, and priorities of different population segments, they fall short from a recognition justice perspective. This study provides a systematic assessment of [...]
Annual high-resolution global ambient population estimates from 1975 to 2024
Published: 2026-08-13
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
Gridded population data support assessments of human exposure, settlement change, infrastructure demand, and access to services, yet global datasets combining annual coverage over multiple decades with fine spatial resolution remain limited. LandScan Mosaic Time Series provides 50 annual estimates of global ambient population distribution at 3 arc-second resolution from 1975 through 2024. The [...]
Thermal migration and climatic de-territorialisation of North American professional sports leagues, 1950–2025
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography
Over the past seven decades, the four major North American professional sports leagues (NHL, MLB, NBA, NFL) have expanded and relocated across the continent, shifting their collective geography towards the Sun Belt. We quantify the climatic consequences of this movement by combining the complete franchise location history of the four leagues from 1950 to 2025 with ERA5-Land reanalysis data and [...]
The Tarim Mega Impact Event: A Permian (~290 Ma) Mega-Impact Triggering Global Magmatism, the Artinskian Warming Event, and the Central Asian Arc-LIP Belt
Published: 2026-07-20
Subjects: Geochemistry, Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology
We propose that an oblique mega-impact by a ferronickel asteroid (~180×100×90 km, 22 km/s, incidence angle 24°) that occurred at ~290 Ma in the present-day Tarim Basin can, through the "thin-target penetration" mechanism, attempt to unify within a single physical framework: (1) the Tarim Large Igneous Province (TLIP) flood basalts; (2) the Pamir–Iran–Turkey arcuate mafic–ultramafic magmatic belt; [...]
Accessibility and its many dimensions: why geographical accessibility should be named explicitly
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Other Geography
In geography and transport research, accessibility is often defined and measured precisely, yet the term is frequently used as shorthand for geographical accessibility. This can reduce transparency in interdisciplinary contexts, where accessibility also refers to social, temporal, financial, informational, institutional, material, skills-related and experiential conditions of actual use. [...]
S²AM-Net: Structure-semantic SAM-guided Network for Few-Shot Segmentation in Mining Areas
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Remote Sensing
Precise mining land-cover classification is essential for monitoring environmental degradation and ecological restoration. Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) offers a promising solution under limited annotations, but it still faces common challenges such as ambiguous foreground features and overfitting to the small support set. Moreover, mining landscapes are characterized by highly detailed structures, [...]