Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Remote Sensing
Natural forests of the world - a 2020 baseline for deforestation and degradation monitoring
Published: 2025-04-29
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Informed decisions to reduce deforestation, protect biodiversity, and curb carbon emissions require not just knowing where forests are, but understanding their composition. Identifying natural forests, which serve as critical biodiversity hotspots and major carbon sinks, is particularly valuable. We developed a novel global natural forest map for 2020 at 10 m resolution. This map can support [...]
Four-Decade Analysis of Fire Behavior in the Brazilian Caatinga Biome 1985-2023
Published: 2025-04-11
Subjects: Forest Management, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
The Caatinga, unique in northeastern Brazil, has species adapted to the semi-arid climate. Recurrent fires put its biodiversity at risk, highlighting the need for urgent measures to protect this fragile ecosystem. This study analyzed four decades of fire behavior in the Caatinga biome (1985-2023) using data from the MapBiomas Fire project and spatial analysis, revealing a worrying dynamic of [...]
Enhancing the Normalized Difference Water Index for Improved Urban Flood Detection
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Other Earth Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Accurate urban flood detection is crucial for effective disaster management and urban planning. Traditional indices like the Normalized Difference Water Index and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index often produce inaccurate results due to spectral confusion in urban areas and sensitivity to shadows. Moreover, MNDWI's reliance on the Shortwave Infrared band limits its use with certain [...]
Understanding Compound Climate Hazards and Exposure from a Spatial Perspective: A Case Study for the Dosso Region, Niger
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Compound climate hazards—where extreme events co-occur— pose increasing risks to our socio-ecological systems, yet their spatial dynamics remain poorly understood. We introduce a novel metric to quantify simultaneous drought and heatwave exposure, applying it to Niger’s Dosso region over a 24-year period (2000–2023) using remote sensing and GIS-based techniques. Our analysis reveals distinct [...]
Reflections on the first State of the Map Conference in Malawi
Published: 2025-03-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
State of the Map (SotM) conferences are important events that enable OpenStreetMap (OSM) contributors and users to present and discuss their work. However, when international SotM conferences are held in the Global North countries, participation by African geospatial scientists is not guaranteed due to various barriers, including travel costs and visa restrictions. Conversely, locally held SotM [...]
Influence of snowpack properties and local incidence angle on SAR signal depolarization: a mathematical model for high-resolution snow depth estimation
Published: 2025-02-26
Subjects: Remote Sensing
Recently, Dual-Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been shown to be effective for large-scale snow cover monitoring, but it faces significant challenges when applied to finer resolutions, which are crucial for applications such as avalanche forecasting. In this study, we propose a novel mathematical model to retrieve snow properties from Sentinel-1 SAR data, leveraging variations in [...]
A review of open data for studying global groundwater in social-ecological systems
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Global data have served an integral role in characterizing large-scale groundwater systems, identifying their sustainability challenges, and informing on socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of groundwater. These insights have revealed groundwater as a dynamic component of both the water cycle and social-ecological systems, leading to an expansion in groundwater science that increasingly [...]
SpartANN - Spectral Pattern Analysis and Remote-sensing Tool with Artificial Neural Networks
Published: 2025-01-28
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Geography, Remote Sensing, Software Engineering
Remote sensing, particularly from satellite observation, has become the standard tool for monitoring the planet with a steady increase of data production, and has seen wide application in ecosystem services analysis and management. Many remote sensing applications involve image classification, using methods from simple regressions to complex machine learning approaches that require advanced user [...]
Site Planning for a Network of Government-operated Weather Stations in the Dominican Republic Using Zonal Statistics from Geospatial Sources, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making, and Neighborhood Analysis
Published: 2024-12-30
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Many weather station networks lack sufficient representativeness, and their station density is often inadequate to capture spatial and climatic variability effectively. Optimal site selection is therefore essential to enhance spatial coverage and improve data quality. This study proposes a methodology for identifying optimal sites for a meteorological station network in the Dominican Republic, [...]
Global drivers of forest loss at 1 km resolution
Published: 2024-12-20
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Forests are in decline worldwide due to human activities such as agricultural expansion, urbanization, and mineral extraction. Forest loss due to generally temporary causes, such as wildfire and forest management, is important to distinguish from permanent land use conversion due to the differing ecological and climate impacts of these disturbances and for the purposes of developing effective [...]
Sensing the dynamic nature of fragmented croplands in India through earth observation: a comprehensive review
Published: 2024-11-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Fragmentation or the breakdown of landholdings to smaller parcels has an adverse impact on crop yields and productivity because of its uneconomic operational sizes. This comprehensive review reflects the insights into the complex dynamics of small landholding (SLs) in India by leveraging earth observation (EO) based sensing technology through synthesizing existing literature, methodologies and [...]
ml4xcube: Machine Learning Toolkits for Earth System Data Cubes
Published: 2024-10-09
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Computer Engineering, Engineering, Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Rapidly changing climate conditions and the increase in extreme events are posing severe challenges to human life and infrastructure, requiring sophisticated analytical capabilities for hazard prediction and disaster risk management. Earth System Data Cubes (ESDCs) have become an essential tool in Earth System Sciences (ESS) by organizing large-scale, multivariate environmental datasets into a [...]
Advancing vegetation monitoring with virtual laser scanning of dynamic scenes (VLS-4D): Opportunities, implementations and future perspectives
Published: 2024-10-07
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Virtual Laser Scanning (VLS) is an established and valuable research tool in forestry and ecology, widely used to simulate labelled LiDAR point cloud data for sensitivity analysis, model training and method testing. In VLS, vegetation has traditionally been modelled as static, neglecting the influence of vegetation dynamics on LiDAR point cloud representations and limiting applications to [...]
Remote sensing and spatial analysis reveal unprecedented cyanobacteria bloom dynamics associated with elephant mass mortality
Published: 2024-05-07
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The 2020 mass mortality of 350 African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in Botswana sparked global concern, with cyanotoxins in watering holes (pans) being a suspected cause, though evidence remains inconclusive. Combining remote sensing and spatial analysis, we examined the relationship between the ecohydrology of ~3,000 pans and the locations of deceased elephants. Our analysis revealed a [...]
A New Spectral Index for Mapping Water Surfaces in Urban Contexts
Published: 2024-04-19
Subjects: Remote Sensing
This paper proposes a modification of MNDWI called Rescaled Water Index, aiming to enhance the delineation and performance of water body mapping in urban areas using satellite imagery. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed index, we compare its performance in mapping water surfaces in different cities in South America with the results obtained by other well-known water indices in the [...]