Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geographic Information Sciences
An automatable method for developing preliminary stream crossing designs using lidar and hydraulic modeling in Massachusetts
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering
Upgrading aging and undersized stream crossings (places where culverts and bridges intersect a stream) with replacements designed for aquatic organism passage can improve infrastructure resiliency, geomorphic stability, and maintenance costs. The goal of this work is to develop preliminary culvert designs that convey hydraulic design floods and meet the Massachusetts Stream Crossings Standards [...]
A pipeline for representing buildings as fuels in wildland urban fire spread and risk modeling
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Mechanical Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Mechanical Engineering, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical and Environmental Geography, Risk Analysis, Software Engineering, Spatial Science
Wildfires pose an increasing risk to structures and communities located adjacent to or among vegetative landscapes. Yet most open landscape-scale fire modeling workflows still lack a reproducible way to represent buildings as combustible fuels rather than only as exposed assets or nonburnable developed land. This paper presents FireDX, a geospatial data engine that generates standardized, [...]
Pixel-Level Urban Housing-Price Mapping Based on AlphaEarth Foundations: Evidence from 36 Chinese Cities
Published: 2026-07-04
Subjects: Computer Engineering, Computer Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Remote Sensing
This study develops and validates a multi-source modelling framework for continuous, pixel-level urban housing-price mapping using surface embeddings from AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF). Pixel-level labels calibrated against multi-source market data are constructed for 288 city–year samples across 36 Chinese cities (2017–2024), and AEF’s 64-dimensional, 10 m annual surface embeddings are [...]
Quantifying Trail-Induced Fragmentation in Protected Natural Areas Using Large-Scale GPS Trajectory Analysis
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography
Protected areas are essential for biodiversity conservation, but recreational activities can fragment habitats through trail networks. This study quantifies trail-induced fragmentation across all protected area types in Switzerland using a novel computational pipeline combining fastgeotoolkit for GPS trajectory processing and GeoPandas for spatial analysis. 3,136 hiking GPS tracks (29,563 km [...]
Teaching geomedia literacy in school geography: Teachers’ perspectives on students’ interpretive and productive skills
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Language and Literacy Education, Other Geography, Science and Mathematics Education, Spatial Science
Maps, diagrams, images, and visualisations are central to how geographical knowledge is learned and communicated in school. Drawing on 20 interviews with Finnish lower and upper secondary geography teachers, this article analyses geomedia literacy as disciplinary literacy through an abductive, theory-informed thematic analysis. Teachers described geomedia as the everyday representational language [...]
Foundational GIS competence, cognitive demand and essay-response maturity in the Finnish geography matriculation examination
Published: 2026-06-21
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: 2026-06-21
Subjects: Education, Educational Methods, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography
Secondary-school GIS teaching offers a window into how geospatial workflows are translated into classroom practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 Finnish lower and upper secondary geography teachers, this article analyses the tools teachers use, the pedagogical organisation of GIS-related work, and the factors shaping its scope, depth, and continuity. The findings show that [...]
How Do General Upper Secondary School Students Interpret Map Information? Geomedia Literacy and Visual Map Elements in Finland’s Geography Matriculation Examination
Published: 2026-06-21
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 (“Visual 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 [...]