Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Remote Sensing
Ghost Infrastructure: Historical Industrial Geography and the Persistence of Path-Dependent Accessibility in Bochum, Germany
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
The complete 69,393 pedestrian street node network from Bochum was used for a Welch's t-test, which revealed as a surprise that street nodes with low accessibility are actually significantly farther from historical industrial sites than street nodes with high accessibility (t=42.887, p<0.00001, Cohen's d=0.589 - medium-to-large effect), which is the opposite of what the original hypothesis [...]
Automated identification, industrial attribution and conditional emission-rate quantification of recurrent CO enhancement source regions from TROPOMI observations
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Remote Sensing
The TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) repeatedly measures global carbon monoxide (CO) total columns, but industrial CO studies generally begin with known cities or facilities; a general method is therefore needed to discover where enhancements recur globally. We developed an automated workflow that searches without facility coordinates. A weakly supervised model screens scenes for [...]
PaddockTS: paddock-level satellite time series analysis of agroecosystem dynamics
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Remote Sensing
PaddockTimeSeries (PaddockTS) is an open-source data analysis pipeline that aligns Earth observation data with agricultural fields, or paddocks—the core land management units where agricultural decisions are made and outcomes such as yield, phenology, productivity, and soil condition are recorded. PaddockTS enables scalable agricultural monitoring and research on how land management and [...]
Global Power Outage Detection at the Kilometer Scale from Satellite Nighttime Lights
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Power and Energy, Public Health, Remote Sensing
Satellite nighttime light observations show great promise for remote sensing of power outages, yet have only been utilized in limited case studies to date. Here, we present generalized detection of power outages across the globe at ~1-kilometer resolution. Our method, the Outage frameWork for Luminosity Interruptions (OWL-I), reveals the power outages can be reliably detected from VIIRS/Black [...]
Comparing UNet and HRNet for Geomorphic Feature Extraction from Digital Terrain Model-Derived Land Surface Parameters
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Remote Sensing
Automated extraction of geomorphic features from high spatial resolution terrain data is important for environmental monitoring, geohazard assessment, and landscape change analysis. This study compares two convolutional neural network architectures, UNet and High-Resolution Network (HRNet), for semantic segmentation of mine benches and sinkholes from lidar-derived digital terrain models and land [...]
Counting the Solomon Islands: How Many Islands Does the Archipelago Actually Contain?
Published: 2026-08-17
Subjects: Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Solomon Islands is widely reported to comprise approximately 900--1,000 islands, a figure repeated across government, tourism, and encyclopedic sources without a traceable methodology. We re-examine this figure using two independent, reproducible geospatial datasets: the USGS/Esri/UNEP-WCMC Global Islands database (30 m Landsat-derived classification) and OpenStreetMap (OSM) land polygon data [...]
SHiPA-LLM: Interpretable Regional Crop Production Estimation and Driver Analysis by Coupling Deep Learning with a Knowledge-Grounded Large Language Model
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Remote Sensing
Under climate change, regional-scale crop production estimation requires not only stable numerical results, but also a traceable evidence chain that can support mechanism diagnosis and decision-making. Existing regional monitoring systems usually rely on stitching multi-source heterogeneous data with complex alignment procedures, and prediction and explanation are often separated, making it [...]
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 [...]
SCI-VIS: Lightweight Visibility Tagging for Coastal Camera Monitoring
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Observations and measurements made from coastal cameras are conditional on the frame being interpretable. Sea fog, glare, rain and condensation on the housing, haze and low light each degrade the imagery, and the shoreline positions, wave measurements and counts derived from a degraded frame are corrupted or spurious. This paper evaluates a per-frame visibility classifier, based on a compact [...]
Detecting illegal water abstractions using Earth Observation and artificial intelligence: challenges, research gaps, and future directions
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Water scarcity and unsustainable withdrawals are major environmental challenges, particularly in semi-arid and Mediterranean regions where agriculture places strong pressure on limited hydrological resources. Illegal or unreported water abstractions intensify these pressures by undermining ecosystem stability, policy compliance, and long-term water security. Although Earth Observation (EO) and [...]
SCI-OBS: Detection and Classification of People on the Beach and in the Surf Zone
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Understanding how many people use beaches and surf zones, and what they are doing there, is vital for safety, tourism and coastal management. Camera-based studies of coastal recreation have to date recovered attendance: a headcount, sometimes divided into coarse zones. This paper reports the accuracy at which the same infrastructure resolves attendance into activity composition, using a [...]
Cloud-Free Imaging Probability Forecasting for Optical Earth-Observation Tasking over Yerevan, Armenia
Published: 2026-07-17
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Remote Sensing
Optical Earth-observation satellites such as Sentinel-2 cannot see through cloud, so a tasking attempt over a cloudy target wastes a limited imaging window along with onboard power and downlink bandwidth. We study whether next-day cloud conditions over Yerevan, Armenia can be forecast accurately enough to automate the binary Go/No-Go tasking decision. Daily cloud-free fractions are derived from [...]
S²AM-Net: Structure-semantic SAM-guided Network for Few-Shot Segmentation in Mining Areas
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Remote Sensing
Precise mining land-cover classification is essential for monitoring environmental degradation and ecological restoration. Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) offers a promising solution under limited annotations, but it still faces common challenges such as ambiguous foreground features and overfitting to the small support set. Moreover, mining landscapes are characterized by highly detailed structures, [...]
Pixel-Level Urban Housing-Price Mapping Based on AlphaEarth Foundations: Evidence from 36 Chinese Cities
Published: 2026-07-04
Subjects: Computer Engineering, Computer Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Remote Sensing
This study develops and validates a multi-source modelling framework for continuous, pixel-level urban housing-price mapping using surface embeddings from AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF). Pixel-level labels calibrated against multi-source market data are constructed for 288 city–year samples across 36 Chinese cities (2017–2024), and AEF’s 64-dimensional, 10 m annual surface embeddings are [...]
Spectrally structured CNN encoding for interpretable and edge-ready fractional vegetation cover mapping using UAS multispectral and imaging spectroscopy
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing
Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is a key indicator of semi-arid ecosystem condition, but non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) remains difficult to map because dry or senescent vegetation, litter, woody debris, and standing dead material can overlap spectrally with photosynthetic vegetation (PV) and bare ground (BE), especially where shadows, exposed bare earth surfaces, and mixed vegetation-soil [...]