Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Field Report No. 1 - Tabor Tree Project Report 2021
Published: 2023-10-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Other Plant Sciences
In this Survey, the Tabor Tree Project identified 130 trees randomly in all 12 zones of the park called Mt. Tabor in Portland, Oregon. The Majority of the Trees at Mt. Tabor Park are conifers, and specifically Douglas Fir who can live longer than 1,000 years. The oldest one in the park is 496 years old, and sprouted sometime around 1520 AD. Through the efforts of Tree Medicine hikes and Citizen [...]
Stay or go? Geographic variation in risks due to climate change for fishing fleets that adapt in-place or adapt on-the-move
Published: 2023-08-17
Subjects: Environmental Studies
From fishers to farmers, people across the planet who rely directly upon natural resources for their livelihoods and well-being face extensive impacts from climate change. However, local- and regional-scale impacts and associated risks can vary geographically, and the implications for development of adaptation pathways that will be most effective for specific communities are underexplored. To [...]
Gender relations and decision-making on climate change adaptation in rural East African households: A qualitative systematic review
Published: 2023-08-09
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Background: Climatic changes are threatening rural livelihoods in East Africa. Evidence suggests that climate change adaptation in this context might reproduce inequitable intra-household gender relations and that adaptation may be more effective when women are involved in meaningful ways. Hence, a nuanced understanding of the gendered nature of intra-household adaptation decision-making is [...]
Urban demand for cooking fuels in two major African cities and implications for policy
Published: 2023-08-05
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Nearly 2.4 billion people lack access to clean cooking fuels and technologies worldwide, representing a critical failure to achieve SDG7’s cooking energy access goal. Dependence on polluting cooking fuels is particularly high in Sub-Saharan Africa, where it generates considerable environmental, health, and time-related costs. In the region, progress has been greatest in urban areas, but [...]
A Web-based Decision Support Framework for Optimizing Road Network Accessibility and Emergency Facility Allocation During Flooding
Published: 2023-08-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Risk Analysis
Transportation systems can be significantly affected by flooding, leading to physical damage and subsequent adverse impacts such as increased travel distance to essential services. Even though flooding is a frequently recurring phenomenon that can affect thousands of people per event, there are limited accessible online tools available for analyzing and visualizing flood risk for supporting [...]
Sustainable irrigation reduces arsenic bioavailability in fluvio-alluvial soils promoting microbial responses, high rice productivity and economic profit
Published: 2023-07-26
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Microbiology
Minimizing arsenic (74.92As33) loading into rice plants, we suggest adopting alternating wetting and drying (AWD) irrigation as a sustainable water management strategy allowing greater silicon (28.08Si14) availability. This two-year field-based project is the first report on AWD's impact on As-Si distribution in fluvio-alluvial soils of the entire Ganga valley (24 study sites divided into six [...]
Adaptation to climate damages is not inevitable
Published: 2023-07-21
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Understanding how climate change will affect human welfare must account for how humans will adapt to the changing environment. Adaptations are often local, unobserved, or will only emerge in the future, posing a challenge for attempts to empirically derive climate damage functions and leading to claims that such empirically based functions overestimate the future economic costs of warming. By [...]
A preliminary assessment of urban water security in Ulaanbaatar, a semi-arid region in Mongolia.
Published: 2023-07-19
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Water security is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Understanding context-specific challenges and opportunities around this issue is key to improving water systems globally. This paper explores the current state of urban water security in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city. Ulaanbaatar is home to more than 40% of the country’s population and 60% of its national GDP. The city is [...]
Impacts of Climate Change on Various Sectors in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan; A Review
Published: 2023-06-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies
Introduction: Day to day atmospheric conditions of an area is referred to as weather, whereas, the statistical expression of weather events in an area over a period of minimum 30 years is called climate. Due to the global warming, weather across the globe has started changing from time to time. As a result, the climate change in different areas have taken rise. Pakistan is amongst the top ten [...]
From Awareness to Action: Unleashing the Transformative Potential of Climate Change Education in St. Michael’s College
Published: 2023-06-24
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The aim of this study is to explore how climate change education is delivered and received in higher education at SMC. As a qualitative study, the study was conducted in the first semester of 2022-2023 and involved 30 students and teachers who participated in semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. The data analysis revealed the themes that emerged from the students’ complex [...]
Towards Understanding the Geospatial Skills of ChatGPT: Taking a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Exam
Published: 2023-06-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Higher Education, Other Geography, Science and Mathematics Education, Spatial Science
This paper examines the performance of ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM), in a geographic information systems (GIS) exam. As LLMs like ChatGPT become increasingly prevalent in various domains, including education, it is important to understand their capabilities and limitations in specialized subject areas such as GIS. Human learning of spatial concepts significantly differs from LLM training [...]
Local social-ecological context explains seasonal rural-rural migration of the poorest in a rural community in southwestern Bangladesh.
Published: 2023-06-02
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Bangladesh is one of the countries most affected by climate change. Internal migration is often presented as a response to environmental degradation in rural areas. Here, we hypothesise that climate-induced changes and adaptations impact local production and the local labour market, seasonally pushing out unskilled landless workers. We focus on different categories of livelihoods and their [...]
Listening to Manchester: Using citizen science Raspberry Shake seismometers to quantify road traffic
Published: 2023-05-31
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Human Geography
Road traffic is a major contributor to greenhouse gases in our cities. This study has been designed to test whether low-cost citizen science seismometers (Raspberry Shakes) can be used to quantify temporal and spatial variations in road traffic. I used a network of seismometers installed around Greater Manchester to record signals in the frequency range 1-50 Hz. Data were processed using the open [...]
The Future in Anthropocene Science
Published: 2023-05-23
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
The Anthropocene is the present time of human-caused accelerating global change, and new forms of Anthropocene risk are emerging that society has hitherto never experienced. Science and policy are grappling with the temporal and spatial magnitude of these changes, as well as the diminishing margin between science and policy itself. However, there is a gap in the transparency — and perhaps even in [...]
Ecological Flows in Southern Europe: status and trends in non-perennial rivers
Published: 2023-05-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The concept of environmental flows (E-Flows) describes the streamflow that is necessary to maintain river ecosystems. Although a large number of methods have been developed, a delay was recorded in implementing E–Flows in non-perennial rivers. The general aim of the paper was to analyse the criticalities and the current state of implementation of the E-Flows in non-perennial rivers of southern [...]