Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Nature and Society Relations
Forest or tundra? How different vegetation reconstructions of Last Glacial landscapes in Europe may shape our perception of early human dispersal processes
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical and Environmental Geography
Regional variability and long-term changes of past ecosystems likely had a strong impact on hunter-gatherer population dynamics, including the expansion of anatomically modern humans and the disappearance of Neanderthals. However, our understanding of these ecosystems remains limited, even when looking at large-scale patterns, such as the extent and distribution of forested areas. Vegetation [...]
Closing the Digital Gap in Nigerian Land Records: An Open-Source QGIS Plugin for Cadastral Survey Archiving and Spatial Management
Published: 2026-05-03
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Secure, retrievable cadastral records are foundational to land tenure security and effective land administration, yet most private cadastral surveying firms in Nigeria maintain survey records exclusively on paper, a structural limitation that prevents spatial querying, concurrent access, and long-term integrity verification across the 50-year archival period required by the Survey Co-ordination [...]
Control of natural hazard events through emergency landscaping
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography
Humans reshape the surface of the Earth through efforts to protect people and places from natural hazards. While some hazard defences, such as river levees, are permanent infrastructure, other measures, such as wildfire fighting, are responsive: they occur while a hazard event is in progress, actively intervening in its behaviour to mitigate its impact. Deliberate, concurrent, mitigating [...]
Assessing the impact of Colombian public land acquisitions on forest cover in the Andes
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
Public land acquisitions (PLAs) are a promising conservation instrument, combining the permanence of protected areas with the voluntary, compensatory structure of payments for ecosystem services, yet causal evidence on their effectiveness remains limited. Colombia’s Article 111 mandate, which requires departments to allocate 1% of revenue to land acquisition for watershed protection, has produced [...]
Regional Economic Impacts and Emission Responses under Solar Radiation Modification
Published: 2026-04-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) has been proposed as a potential tool to limit increases in global or regional temperatures caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. While previous research has extensively examined the climate system's response to various SRM strategies, as well as their aggregate economic consequences, the regional distribution of economic impacts has received less [...]
Knowledge for ambitious, integrated, value-explicit and just collective actions towards global biodiversity targets
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Nature and Society Relations
Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreed upon goals and targets for biodiversity in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The success of the GBF depends on the collective actions of the Parties, i.e. member states, to the CBD. Essential challenges in this context include ensuring that efforts across Parties are sufficient to collectively meet global [...]
Agricultural expansion and intensification in Brazil: A literature synthesis of dynamics, drivers, and implications
Published: 2026-03-24
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
Brazil’s long-term agricultural development reflects a complex interplay between human-driven land-use change and natural ecosystems. Since the 1960s, agricultural production in Brazil has expanded rapidly, driven by global food demand and national economic growth, through two primary pathways: (1) agricultural expansion via conversion of natural vegetation, particularly forests, and (2) [...]
Sustaining Life on the Fault Line: Women’s Social Reproduction and Grassroots Disaster Governance in Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Published: 2026-03-19
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations
Mainstream disaster resilience studies overwhelmingly privilege top-down institutional frameworks, leaving the socio-economic and care-oriented contributions of women undertheorized as constitutive forces in how resilience is actually produced at the community level. This study examines how women’s everyday practices and organizational capacities shape disaster preparedness, response, and [...]
Inequality’s contribution to global catastrophic risk
Published: 2026-03-13
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Sciences, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Inequality is rising and so is global catastrophic risk. These two problems are not independent from each other. Inequality has historically been a major driver of social instability, and is increasing the risk of global catastrophes today. We demonstrate this by drawing on the rich literature around societal collapse and global catastrophe from both past and modern societies, highlighting the [...]
Future heat-stress regimes under CMIP6: a multi-index assessment of persistence and human-relevant thermal constraints
Published: 2026-03-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies, Geography, Nature and Society Relations
Human exposure to heat stress is increasing under climate change as rising temperatures interact with atmospheric moisture to constrain thermoregulation and outdoor activity. While numerous heat-stress indices are used in climate impact studies, their joint interpretation in terms of climatic regimes, persistence, and physiological relevance remains fragmented. Here, we provide a global, [...]
Mapping Temperature Deviation and Elderly Vulnerability using Open Source Technology: A One-Week Analysis of Manhattan, New York City
Published: 2026-02-23
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
This paper outlines a research method for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing real-time temperature data for cities using open data and open source technology. The system collects temperature data for each census tract in Manhattan three times daily via the OpenWeather API and stores observations in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. A one-week pilot study (November 15-22, 2025) analyzed 8,990 [...]
Implementing the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement in a State Centric System: The Role of AI in Data Readiness, Corporate Traceability, and EIA Consistency in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ)
Published: 2026-02-15
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) cover most of the ocean but remain governed through fragmented regimes and uneven scientific capacity. The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement aims to strengthen marine biodiversity conservation in these waters through marine protected areas and other area-based management tools, environmental impact assessment (EIA), marine genetic [...]
Governing the cryosphere beyond political timeframes
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Glaciology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Sustainability
Cryospheric systems are nearing irreversible thresholds, yet political processes remain misaligned with the long timescales of ice loss. Using COP30 as context, we argue that cryosphere science must inform governance capable of linking near-term decisions with long-term stability in a rapidly changing world.
Impact of Land Use and Land Cover Changes on Ecosystem Services: A Multi-Module InVEST-LCM Analysis
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
Land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics influence ecological processes and the provision of essential ecosystem services (ESs). So, understanding how LULC changes influence ESs is critical for sustainable land management and conservation planning, especially in rapidly urbanizing watersheds. Despite studies examining individual ecosystem services, there remains a notable research gap in [...]
DOZER: a toy model of coastal hazard mitigation during a storm
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Dynamical Systems, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Science and Mathematics Education, Sustainability
Motivated by observations of emergency road-maintenance crews in coastal settings, DOZER is a video game in which the player uses a bulldozer to clear sand from a beachfront road during a storm. DOZER is also a toy model in a formal sense: a heuristic tool for insight into the dynamics of real-time intervention in the physical processes of a natural hazard. Here, I introduce DOZER as both a game [...]