Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
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
sea level rise stacked on top of degrading natural coastal defenses. That assumption is rarely tested againstindependent, multi temporal evidence, and rarely broken down by ecosystem type, so I tested it directly,across 5 islands spanning 3 ocean basins (Maldives, Lakshadweep, [...]
Competing Psychological Pathways Linking Age and Individual and Collective Pro-Environmental Behavior Intentions: The Role of Conservatism
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Promoting pro-environmental behavior (PEB) across the lifespan is critical for achieving an effective response to climate change. This may particularly be important in later life, as older adults hold substantial economic resources and electoral influence, enabling them to shape societal responses to environmental challenges. However, they have also been found to be more likely than younger [...]
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
Drought detection in India, both for official declaration purposes and for triggering payouts under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) crop-insurance scheme, still leans heavily on rainfall-deficit records and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) — two signals that only move once a crop has already begun to visibly suffer. This study asks whether Solar-Induced Fluorescence [...]
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 terraces are elevated, flat-topped deposits of intermontane lake-basin age (Pleistocene/Pliocene), and they underlie one of Kashmir's most economically significant agricultural systems — the saffron-growing belt at Pampore. Everyone who follows agriculture in Kashmir already knows these terraces are vanishing under unregulated soil mining and uncontrolled urban expansion; there's ample [...]
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 [...]
The Cotton Line: Testing the Institutional Persistence of an Erased Colonial Land-Tenure Boundary Across Vidarbha's Agrarian and Vegetation Geography
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, International and Area Studies, Statistics and Probability
Are there 150-year-old institutional legacies measurable in the 21st century as a spatial signature, in patterns of vegetation phenology (cotton signatures), agrarian labor structure, land use and land surface temperature? That is the core question this paper addresses and the design is not a 'before'-'after', it's a 'spatial discontinuity' test to see if there is still a measurable gap across an [...]
Measured or assumed? Regulatory defaults, ownership, and the measurement content of the U.S. greenhouse gas inventory
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Risk Analysis
Municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest anthropogenic source of methane in the United States, and the national inventory for this source is assembled almost entirely from facility self-reports filed under Subpart HH of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP). Airborne and satellite surveys estimate actual emissions at 1.4 to 2.7 times reported levels, but remote sensing alone [...]
Incomplete coverage of the state of nature across biodiversity credit methodologies: an assessment using the State of Nature metrics framework
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
Biodiversity credits are growing rapidly, yet the proliferation of methodologies has raised concerns about their quality and integrity. Because biodiversity cannot be reduced to a single common unit, methodologies differ in their choice of indicators; previous comparative studies, however, have examined only aggregation levels or taxonomic focus, leaving unaddressed how comprehensively [...]
Source-composition sensitivity in historical marine wind observations: a CLIWOC case study, 1750--1855
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Library and Information Science, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Applied Mathematics, Other Computer Sciences
Recovering Climate’s History with Artificial Intelligence used the CLIWOC ship-logbook database to argue that sailors’ wind observations reveal a previously undetected shift in global atmospheric circulation between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We reproduce the article's principal annual aggregate from CLIWOC release 2.1 and find that this unstandardized, record-weighted [...]
Nature dependency analysis and the contributions to assessing nature-related risks
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Human dependency on natural capital and ecosystem services (ES) present significant risks to wellbeing and economic prosperity, which are poorly understood. While tools, such as the Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure (ENCORE) database, provide valuable global dependency information, translating these insights into country-specific contexts remains challenging. Here, we [...]
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 [...]
Socio-economic characterization and Natural Resource appraisal for watershed development around Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Project sites in Andhra Pradesh, India
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Environmental Studies
A comprehensive baseline study was conducted to develop the watershed treatment plan around four Pumped Storage Hydro-electric Project sites in Andhra Pradesh, India. As a part of study, household survey was conducted with 450 samples around 10 km radius of project reservoir sites. The data was collected on socio-economic conditions of communities and natural resource status around the [...]
Spatiotemporal Variation and Driving Forces of Ecological Quality in the Ili Grassland Based on the Remote Sensing Ecological Index: Implications for Sustainable Ecotourism
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Abstract: The Ili Grassland is an important ecological security barrier in northwestern China and a region with abundant ecotourism resources. Scientifically evaluating the spatiotemporal variations in ecological environmental quality and identifying its key driving factors are essential for regional ecological conservation and sustainable ecotourism development. In this study, MODIS remote [...]
A novel integrated assessment framework to inform Australia's net zero transition
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Australia has set an ambitious goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Attaining this target will require important transformations across multiple sectors of the economy. Integrated assessment models can provide valuable insights into the interactions across sectors of the economy, including land, agriculture and energy, to guide these complex transformations. However, many [...]