Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Back to the fields: COVID-19 impact on agricultural activity detected with satellite data
Published: 2021-02-03
Subjects: Environmental Studies
In response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers worldwide adopted unprecedented measures to limit disease spread, with major repercussions on labour markets and economic growth. Here we provide empirical evidence of their impact on agricultural activity due to sectoral labour reallocation. Analysing daily satellite data in a non-parametric machine learning statistical framework over [...]
Climate change research and action must look beyond 2100
Published: 2020-12-16
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth’s climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for prediction. Estimating the effects of past, current, and potential future emissions to only 2100 is therefore [...]
Global lockdown potential impact on achieving Sustainable Development Goals
Published: 2020-11-16
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Life Sciences
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a lockdown worldwide. This restriction on human movements and activities significantly influences society and the environment. We examined the consequences of global lockdown for human movement and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions using an air pollution index and dataset and satellite image analyses. We also evaluated the immediate (during [...]
ENSO Drives Child Undernutrition in the Global Tropics
Published: 2020-11-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Other Environmental Sciences, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a principal component of global climate variability known to influence a host of social and economic outcomes, but its systematic effects on human health remain poorly understood. We estimate ENSO’s association with child nutrition at global scale by combining variation in ENSO intensity from 1986-2018 with children’s height and weight from 186 surveys [...]
Using Machine-Learning Models for Field-Scale Crop Yield and Condition Modeling in Argentina
Published: 2020-11-09
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Accurately determining crop growth progress and crop yields at field-scale can help farmers estimate their net profit, enable insurance compa-nies to ascertain payouts, and help in ensuring food security. At field scales, the troika of management, soil and weather combine to impact crop growth pro-gress, and this progress can be monitored in-season using satellite data. Here, we use satellite [...]
Socio-technical multi-criteria evaluation of long-term spent nuclear fuel management strategies: Supplementary method
Published: 2020-11-06
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Risk Analysis, Sustainability
The paper presents supplementary information about the framework and method for the socio-technical multi-criteria evaluation (STMCE) of spent fuel management strategies (Sci Total Environ, In press; Available on EarthArXiv at DOI:10.31223/X5459S). The STMCE approach consists of (i) a multi-criteria evaluation that provides an ordinal ranking of alternatives based on a list of criterion [...]
Socio-technical multi-criteria evaluation of long-term spent nuclear fuel management strategies: A framework and method
Published: 2020-11-05
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
In the absence of a federal geologic repository or consolidated, interim storage in the United States, commercial spent fuel will remain stranded at some 75 sites across the country. Currently, these include 18 “orphaned sites” where spent fuel has been left at decommissioned reactor sites. In this context, local communities living close to decommissioned nuclear power plants are increasingly [...]
Evaluating participatory modelling methods for co-creating pathways to sustainability
Published: 2020-11-03
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Planetary Sciences, Systems Engineering
The achievement of global sustainability agendas, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, relies on transformational change across society, economy, and environment that are co-created in a transdisciplinary exercise by all stakeholders. Within this context, environmental and societal change is increasingly understood and represented via participatory modelling for genuine engagement with [...]
Transitioning Machine Learning from Theory to Practice in Natural Resources Management
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Agriculture, Computer Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Water Resource Management
Advances in sensing and computation have accelerated at unprecedented rates and scales, in turn creating new opportunities for natural resources managers to improve adaptive and predictive management practices by coupling large environmental datasets with machine learning (ML). Yet, to date, ML models often remain inaccessible to managers working outside of academic research. To identify [...]
Structure-from-Motion on shallow reefs and beaches: potential and limitations of consumer-grade drones to reconstruct topography and bathymetry
Published: 2020-10-21
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Studies, Fluid Dynamics, Fresh Water Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Remote Sensing
Reconstructing the topography of shallow underwater environments using Structure-from-Motion – Multi View Stereo (SfM-MVS) techniques applied to aerial imagery from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a challenging problem, as it involves non-linear distortions caused by water refraction. This study presents an experiment with aerial photographs collected with a consumer-grade UAV on the [...]
Climate has contrasting direct and indirect effects on armed conflicts
Published: 2020-07-08
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Library and Information Science, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistics and Probability
There is an active debate regarding the influence that climate has on the risk of armed conflict, which stems from challenges in assembling unbiased datasets, competing hypotheses on the mechanisms of climate influence, and the difficulty of disentangling direct and indirect climate effects. We use gridded historical non-state conflict records, satellite data, and land surface models in a [...]
Increased air pollution exposure among the Chinese population during the national quarantine in 2020
Published: 2020-06-15
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The COVID-19 quarantine in China is thought to have been beneficial for reducing the population exposure to ambient air pollution. The overall exposure also depends, however, on indoor air quality and human mobility and activities, which also changed during the pandemic. Here we integrate real-time mobility data, questionnaire survey on during-pandemic human activity patterns, advanced air [...]
COVID-19 Pandemic – Possible implications and effects of monsoons in the Indian sub-continent.
Published: 2020-06-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The world is facing an unprecedented time owing to the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic. The research community is racing to find a solution to contain the outbreak, leading to the proposals of many possible routes of the virus transmission and its dynamics. The Indian sub-continent is about to experience the monsoon season, which often leads to heavy rainfall and flooding in the region, affecting the [...]
Addressing Model Data Archiving Needs for the Department of Energy’s Environmental Systems Science Community
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Researchers in the Department of Energy’s ESS program use a variety of models to advance robust, scale-aware predictions of terrestrial and subsurface ecosystems. ESS projects typically conduct field observations and experiments coupled with modeling exercises using a model-experimental (ModEx) approach that enables iterative co-development of experiments and models, and ensures that experimental [...]
Identification of Hydrologic Landscapes in Brazilian basins and its application as indicator of water yield and storage
Published: 2020-04-09
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This study aimed to use the Hydrologic Landscapes as environmental classification method in the Piracicaba, Capivari and Jundiaí river basins, validate and use it as an indicator of water yield and storage areas. The method comprises in the same Information Plan (IP) factors that interact with the hydrological cycle in its terrestrial phase. The state of São Paulo, where most of the area is [...]