Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Reconstructing Nineteenth-Century River Water Levels with Transformer-Based Computer Vision
Published: 2025-10-11
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Physical and Environmental Geography
Nineteenth-century Bavarian Danube gauge charts (1826–1894) were converted into daily water-level series referenced to gauge zero through a semi-automated workflow combining light document pre-processing, dewarping, transformer-based line extraction, pixel-to-curve calibration, and targeted human checks. A curated ground-truth sample supported benchmarking and uncertainty quantification. On three [...]
Contrasting patterns of deforestation and reforestation in India’s tropical dry woodlands
Published: 2025-10-07
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Tropical dry woodlands are key ecosystems for global biodiversity, carbon storage, and forest-based livelihoods in some of the poorest regions of the world. Many of these woodlands have been historically converted and degraded, and while recovery occurs in some areas, the pressure on remaining tropical dry woodlands remains high. Despite this, our understanding of spatial patterns of tropical dry [...]
From Complex SDG Systems to Network Models: an Ontology-Based Eight-Step Framework
Published: 2025-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies, Sustainability
With only 18% of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on track for 2030, systems-based approaches to understanding their interdependencies are essential. Network science can reveal leverage points and guide prioritisation, yet it is often applied without sufficient domain integration, obscuring rather than clarifying sustainability dynamics. We present an eight-step framework for evaluating [...]
Coupling local perspectives with remotely sensed data to better understand small-scale tropical forest changes
Published: 2025-09-30
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Forests are essential for climate, biodiversity and society. Conserving or increasing forest cover is the focus of many national and international policies. Yet implementing such policies at local levels remains a massive challenge, in part due to contrasting perceptions of small-scale forest cover changes and their effects on livelihoods. In this study, we couple remotely sensed forest cover [...]
ClimActor 2.0: A spatialized database of subnational climate pledges and emissions data
Published: 2025-09-30
Subjects: Environmental Studies
ClimActor 2.0 is an open, spatialized database that compiles climate targets, action plans, and self-reported emission inventories from subnational governments, including cities, municipalities, states and regions, worldwide. The dataset provides standardized administrative boundaries for each entity, enabling direct linkage to geospatial data such as population, GDP, land cover, and other [...]
Impact of Land Use and Land Cover Changes on Ecosystem Services: A Multi-Module InVEST-LCM Analysis
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
Land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics influence ecological processes and the provision of essential ecosystem services (ESs). So, understanding how LULC changes influence ESs is critical for sustainable land management and conservation planning, especially in rapidly urbanizing watersheds. Despite studies examining individual ecosystem services, there remains a notable research gap in [...]
Hydrology-Based Coastal Risk Assessment in Charleston, South Carolina: Sea-Level Rise, Land Subsidence, Nuisance Flooding, and the Overlooked Role of Groundwater Attenuation
Published: 2025-08-29
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Charleston, South Carolina is among the most flood-exposed cities on the United States Atlantic coast. Tide-gauge records show mean sea level rising at 3.51 mm per year since 1921, while InSAR analyses identify localized subsidence exceeding 4 mm per year, producing effective relative rise of 7 to 8 mm per year. This acceleration explains the increase in nuisance flooding from fewer than 5 days [...]
Designing nature-building communities
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Urban renaturing efforts increasingly emphasize the role of collaborative governance in managing nature-based solutions (NbS). However, existing frameworks often prioritize institutional perspectives and top-down participation, overlooking the early-stage design needs of grassroots initiatives. This study introduces the concept of Nature-Building Communities (NbCs)—voluntary, community-driven [...]
Methodological Concerns Regarding RSPO Certification and Plantation Efficiency in Malaysia. A commentary on "Sustainable Palm Oil Certification Inadvertently Affects Production Efficiency in Malaysia" by Zachlod et al. (2025).
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Sustainability
This commentary is in response to the recent article by Zachlod et al. (2025), Sustainable palm oil certification inadvertently affects production efficiency in Malaysia published in Communications Earth & Environment, 6(1), 200. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02150-2. It concludes that Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification leads to reduced plantation efficiency in [...]
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
Turkana’s Boiling Bowl: Extreme Heat and Social Norms fuel Gender Inequality
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Climate change impedes human and economic development globally. The frequency, intensity, and duration of climate extremes, including droughts, floods, heatwaves and cyclones, pose significant threats to health, nutrition, water access, livelihoods and ecosystems. Due to escalating extreme weather events, more populations are becoming vulnerable with women and girls increasingly exposed to [...]
Participatory assessment of French Reed Beds (FRB) as natural based solution for rural sanitation in arid environments: insights from Ouijjane project in Morocco
Published: 2025-08-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Water Resource Management
Rural improved sanitation remains a major challenge to achieving the UN SDG 6 goal. In this regard, this study evaluates, with local stakeholders, an operational rural sanitation project in Ouijjane commune, Morocco, using French Reed Bed (FRB) technology. Data from project documentation, as well as field interviews and focus group discussions, were used to carry out a participatory evaluation. [...]
Technological Adaptation Outpaces Climate Impacts on Aviation: Evidence from Three Decades of Warming
Published: 2025-08-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Climate impact assessments frequently prioritize projections over empirical validation of operational outcomes. We introduce and apply a generalizable empirical validation framework that (i) separates operational encounters from safety outcomes and (ii) tests climate → operations linkages via physical mechanism validation with explicit detectability bounds. Using 33 years (1991–2023) of U.S. [...]
“It is a sham process with participation.” Ten forms of citizen participation for sustainable development in the Norwegian Arctic
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Environmental Studies
This study examined practices of citizen participation at the municipal level and the role of sustainability in this context in various municipalities in Nordland, Finnmark, and Troms in the Norwegian Arctic. Analysis of transcripts from 75 interviews identified 10 forms of citizen participation in planning processes and meetings aimed at discussing local challenges and possible solutions. Only [...]
Iran’s Sustainability Gap: An Economic Analysis
Published: 2025-07-29
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Iran faces a widening sustainability gap as biocapacity stagnates while the ecological footprint expands. This study investigates how external debt, economic growth, natural resource rents, and renewable energy consumption affect the national load capacity factor—a composite index of biocapacity relative to ecological demand. Annual data for 1995–2023 were compiled from the World Bank and the [...]