Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Drivers of fire regimes in the Brazilian Amazon from 2011-2020
Published: 2022-10-18
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Over the last decade, carbon emissions due to forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon, linked mainly to logging and wildfires, became larger than carbon emissions due to deforestation. Climatic and ecological processes affect the landscape’s flammability, while socio-economic processes influence the use of fire for deforestation and agricultural land management. However, a comprehensive [...]
The Openscapes Flywheel: A framework for managers to facilitate and scale inclusive Open science practices
Published: 2022-10-10
Subjects: Adult and Continuing Education, Environmental Studies, Remote Sensing
Solutions to large-scale environmental and social challenges require radical collaboration that blends technology and people — and the Open science movement is answering that call by transforming how we work together. While often the focus is on data, publications, code, software developers, and researchers, the transition to Open involves investment across agencies and organizations of all [...]
Rapid estimation of climate-air quality interactions in integrated assessment using a response surface model
Published: 2022-09-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies
Air quality and climate change are substantial and linked sustainability challenges, and there is a need for improved tools to assess the implications of addressing them in combination. High-fidelity chemistry-climate simulations can capture combined climate-air quality responses to policy change, but computational cost has prevented integration of accurate air quality impacts into integrated [...]
Pumped Storage Hydropower: A Grid Intermittency Solution
Published: 2022-08-30
Subjects: Environmental Studies
As public pressure and state emissions targets increasingly promote grid decarbonization, society must find solutions to the intermittency problem of renewable energy. While several emerging battery technologies provide a solution to this problem, pumped storage hydropower (PSH) is the most promising given its long lifecycle and widespread deployment. This paper will analyze and compare PSH with [...]
Comparing the Efficacy of First and Second Generation Biofuels and Analyzing Future Trends in the Field
Published: 2022-08-17
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Biofuels are widely touted as a strong alternative for alleviating the harmful effects of conventional fossil fuels. Existing data on biofuel CO2 emissions, net emissions, land area and land type required, fuel yield, and energy efficiency metrics for both existing biofuels and biofuels in the research phase is compiled and a critical analytical review is conducted. Our analysis clearly shows the [...]
Applying a science-forward approach to groundwater regulatory design
Published: 2022-07-14
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Nature and Society Relations
Groundwater sustainability is challenged by the difference between legal and scientific understanding of groundwater as well as the lack of focused attention to regulatory design in the literature on groundwater institutions, governance and management. The purpose of this paper is to use groundwater science to direct the necessary elements of regulatory design for the unique characteristics of [...]
The Lock-Down Effects of COVID-19 on the Air Pollution Indices in Iran and Its Neighbors
Published: 2022-07-02
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Other Statistics and Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Introduction The Covid-19 restrictions have a lot of various peripheral negative and positive effects like economic shocks and decreasing air pollution, respectively. Many studies showed NO2 reduction in most parts of the world. Method Iran and its land and maritime neighbors have about 7.4% of the world population and 6.3% and 5.8% of World COVID-19 cases and deaths, respectively. The air [...]
Flood Susceptibility Mapping using Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process for Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Published: 2022-06-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies
Floods affect over 2.2 billion people worldwide, and their frequency is increasing at an alarming rate compared to other natural disasters. Presidential disaster declarations have issued increasingly almost every year in Iowa for the past 30 years, indicating that the state is on the rise of flood risk. While significant scientific and technological advancement is becoming available for many [...]
Centering Equity in the Nation's Weather, Water and Climate Services
Published: 2022-05-19
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Water, weather, and climate affect everyone. However, their impacts on various communities can be very different based on who has access to essential services and environmental knowledge. At the same time, structural discrimination, including racism and other forms of privileging and exclusion, affects people's lives and health, with ripples across all sectors of society. In the United States, [...]
The quest for the missing plastics: Large uncertainties in river plastic export into the sea
Published: 2022-05-16
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Studies, Hydrology
Plastic pollution in the natural environment is causing increasing concern at both the local and global scale. Understanding the dispersion of plastic through the environment is of key importance for the effective implementation of preventive measures and cleanup strategies. Over the past few years, various models have been developed to estimate the transport of plastics in rivers, using limited [...]
Cutting down trees does not build prosperity: On the continued decoupling of Amazon deforestation and economic development in 21st century Brazil
Published: 2022-05-13
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Management, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
Background and aims: We present evidence examining spatial and temporal patterns in forest cover changes and economic progress in Brazilian Amazonia. Specifically we tested two predictions embedded in arguments used by influential interest groups: i) where there is less forest cover economic progress should increase and ii) areas with most recent deforestation should have increased economic [...]
A mid-20th century estimate of global vegetation carbon stocks based on inventory statistics
Published: 2022-03-28
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography
Biomass carbon stocks (BCS) play a vital role in the climate system, but benchmarked estimates prior to the late 20th century remain scarce. Here, by making use of an early global forest resource assessment and harmonizing information on land use and carbon densities, we establish a global BCS account for the year 1950. Our best-guess BCS estimate is 450.7 PgC (median of all modulations: 518.3 [...]
The long-run welfare impact of hydrological extremes in sub-Saharan Africa
Published: 2022-03-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Hydrology
The economic impact of dry and wet spells is increasingly investigated, also relative to anthropogenic climate change. Combining high-resolution wealth estimates and long-run (1901-2018) hydrological records for nearly one million settlements , here we empirically estimate the long-run welfare impact of hydrological events in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). To achieve causal identification, we adopt a [...]
Investment needs to achieve SDGs: an overview
Published: 2022-03-18
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Estimating the investments needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is key to mobilising the financial resources to achieve them. Despite an increasing body of research to estimate the capital and operational costs towards achieving various related SDG targets individually and collectively, an overview of the total estimated investment needs at the global scale has not been [...]
Large-area mapping of active cropland and short-term fallows in smallholder landscapes using PlanetScope data
Published: 2022-03-17
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Cropland mapping in smallholder landscapes is challenged by complex and fragmented landscapes, labor-intensive and unmechanized land management causing high within-field variability, rapid dynamics in shifting cultivation systems, and substantial proportions of short-term fallows. To overcome these challenges, we here present a large-area mapping framework to identify active cropland and [...]