Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Assessing Challenges for U.S.-Based Polar Early Career Scientists During Science Policy Changes
Published: 2026-09-13
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geography, Glaciology, Hydraulic Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Early-career researchers (ECRs) play a critical role in sustaining polar and cryosphere research in the United States. Since January 2025, changes in U.S. science policy and federal research funding have created substantial uncertainty for researchers, particularly those in the early stages of their careers. To assess the impacts of these changes, we conducted a community-driven survey of [...]
Where the green goes: green-network configuration and the super-additive loss of urban biodiversity under polyuncertainty
Published: 2026-09-12
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Climate assessment for cities proceeds one pressure at a time, its uncertainty treated as a sum of separable parts. Compound-event research shows this understates risk when drivers are dependent, and urban ecology that habitat arrangement, not quantity, governs which species persist. These have not been joined, so the contribution of green-infrastructure configuration, as against extent, to [...]
Climate Change and Crop Production in The Gambia: Farmers’ Perceptions, Agricultural Practices, and Adaptation Strategies
Published: 2026-09-10
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Background Climate change threatens crop production, food security, and rural livelihoods, particularly where smallholder farmers depend on rain-fed agriculture. The Gambia is exposed to rising temperatures, rainfall variability, droughts, floods, land degradation, and coastal hazards. This study assessed crop farmers' perceptions of climate change, their agricultural practices and adaptation [...]
A safe and just operating space for water at municipal scale: population, agriculture and mining in Chihuahua, Mexico, to 2050
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water allocation decisions in Mexico are taken municipality by municipality, yet water scarcity is assessed at national or basin scale. We operationalize a safe and just operating space for water for each of the 67 municipalities of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest and driest mining state, with both bounds drawn from national law rather than imposed by the analyst: an ecological ceiling equal to the [...]
Beyond climate-change risk: subjective attribution, multidimensional impact appraisal, and adaptation advocacy among Swedish forestry professionals
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Adaptation may depend on whether decision-makers recognise climate change, but also on whether they attribute experienced changes to climate change and how they appraise consequences across valued domains. We analysed survey data from 140 Swedish forestry professionals to examine whether stronger subjective attribution of experienced forest changes to climate change is associated with more [...]
Cloud Cover and Structural Observation Gaps in African Agricultural Earth Observation: Evidence from Six Agroecological Zones
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Optical Earth observation underpins a growing number of agricultural-monitoring and agri-fintech services across Africa, all of which need a usable view of a field often enough to track its condition. Cloud gaps in that record are usually treated as random missing data; we test whether they are instead structurally biased. Using three growing seasons (2022–2024) of Sentinel-2 scene-classification [...]
BORDER OPTICS : Satellite Verification of India's Vibrant Villages Programme: A Compositing-Window Robustness Assessment of Border-Village Development
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ask the Government of India if things have worked out for them with their flagship scheme for the Border Villages, the honest answer (on parliamentary record) is No, it has never been verified anywhere. The Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP-I) has approved around ₹4,800 crore in support of 2,967 villages in five Himalayan border states/union territories including 662 villages marked 'priority' for [...]
What Does a Country-Level Difference-in-Differences on Satellite NO₂ Identify? Baseline Composition, Winter Retrievals and the European Climate Law
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 [...]
DOUBLE JEOPARDY: Do Coastal Rules Reach the People at Risk? Comparing Five Island Jurisdictions
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 a rising sea at the same time as the reefs and mangroves that shelter them are under stress. 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 [...]
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: Does Solar-Induced Fluorescence Signal Agricultural Drought Earlier than NDVI in Marathwada, India?
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 [...]
Stolen Strata: Brick Kilns and the Loss of Karewa Tableland in Budgam, Kashmir,1993–2025, with a Correction to an Earlier Estimate
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 [...]
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
Can a provincial boundary abolished in 1956 still be detected in today's farmland? In the nineteenth century Berar, in western Vidarbha, was settled under the Ryotwari land-revenue system. The Central Provinces districts to the east were settled under Malguzari. On district lineage the old line matches the present boundary between Amravati and Nagpur Divisions, which I rebuild as a 384.7 km line [...]
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 [...]