Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Nature and Society Relations
Annual high-resolution global ambient population estimates from 1975 to 2024
Published: 2026-08-13
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
Gridded population data support assessments of human exposure, settlement change, infrastructure demand, and access to services, yet global datasets combining annual coverage over multiple decades with fine spatial resolution remain limited. LandScan Mosaic Time Series provides 50 annual estimates of global ambient population distribution at 3 arc-second resolution from 1975 through 2024. The [...]
Unequal scaling of urban vegetation cooling across sociodemographic groups
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Urban vegetation mitigates heat in cities, but its benefits often reach disadvantaged residents least, an inequality of growing concern as climate change intensifies urban heat. Whether residence-based cooling exposure and its inequality scale systematically with population size and density, as infrastructural and socioeconomic attributes do, remains unclear. Here, we simulate process-based [...]
Thermal migration and climatic de-territorialisation of North American professional sports leagues, 1950–2025
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography
Over the past seven decades, the four major North American professional sports leagues (NHL, MLB, NBA, NFL) have expanded and relocated across the continent, shifting their collective geography towards the Sun Belt. We quantify the climatic consequences of this movement by combining the complete franchise location history of the four leagues from 1950 to 2025 with ERA5-Land reanalysis data and [...]
A pipeline for representing buildings as fuels in wildland urban fire spread and risk modeling
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Mechanical Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Mechanical Engineering, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical and Environmental Geography, Risk Analysis, Software Engineering, Spatial Science
Wildfires pose an increasing risk to structures and communities located adjacent to or among vegetative landscapes. Yet most open landscape-scale fire modeling workflows still lack a reproducible way to represent buildings as combustible fuels rather than only as exposed assets or nonburnable developed land. This paper presents FireDX, a geospatial data engine that generates standardized, [...]
AEF-Econ: Toward Plug-and-Play Socioeconomic Foundation Embeddings from AlphaEarth for Urban Remote Sensing
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) unify global remote sensing foundation embeddings through multimodal self-supervised learning, but their pretraining focuses on physical land-surface signals, limiting plug-and-play use in socioeconomic tasks. We integrate seven heterogeneous data streams across 36 Chinese cities over eight years—AEF embeddings, population, nighttime lights, remote sensing indices, [...]
Awareness and Action: An Exploration Between Public Perception and Space Industry Priorities Regarding Sustainability
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
As issues regarding sustainability continue to grow more urgent and prevalent to everyday life, it is important to recognize whether society fully understands what is occurring. The low earth orbit is at threat of overcongestion, and the environment is experiencing higher rates of pollution due to rocket launches, calling for the need for the government and public to engage in this issue. [...]
Productive Rather Than Aesthetic Urban Landscapes Drive Actualized Sustainable Consumption
Published: 2026-05-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations
Global sustainability initiatives prioritize urban greenery to foster resilient cities, yet their efficacy remains under-researched in the Global South. Conventional reliance on self-reported data risks a pervasive “green illusion”— a discrepancy between reported behavior and actual sustainable consumption behavior. To diagnose this anomaly, we synthesize spatial morphology and psychometric [...]
Operationalising EMS-98 Damage Classification: A UAV-to-GIS Pipeline for Macroseismic Survey Support
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Post-earthquake macroseismic surveying often relies on ground-based visual inspections that are slow, costly, and difficult to scale in the immediate aftermath of a seismic event. Deep-learning damage detectors have advanced substantially in recent years, yet their outputs are rarely translated into operational deployment tools that yield a georeferenced dataframe of buildings aligned with the [...]
Forest or tundra? How different vegetation reconstructions of Last Glacial landscapes in Europe may shape our perception of early human dispersal processes
Published: 2026-05-08
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) [...]