Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Remote Sensing
What Did the Destruction of the Kakhovka Dam Do to Vegetation? Separating Flood, Reservoir and Irrigation Effects with Satellite Data
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
The Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine was destroyed on 6 June 2023. This could have changed vegetation in three ways: through the flood below the dam, the draining of the reservoir, and the loss of water for the irrigation canals. All three happened inside an active war zone. I tested each pathway separately with MODIS NDVI at 250 m resolution for 2016–2024. Treated land was defined by what [...]
What Does a Country-Level Difference-in-Differences on Satellite NO₂ Identify? Baseline Composition, Winter Retrievals and the European Climate Law
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, International and Area Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
Satellite observations make it easy to compare air pollution in countries that adopted a policy with countries that did not. This paper examines what such a comparison identifies. It uses Sentinel-5P TROPOMI tropospheric NO₂ for 2019–2024 and a country-level difference-in-differences (DiD) model of the European Climate Law that compares the EU-27 with nine neighbouring non-EU countries. NO₂ fell [...]
DOUBLE JEOPARDY: Do Coastal Rules Reach the People at Risk? Comparing Five Island Jurisdictions
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Hydrology, International and Area Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Sustainability
Low islands face a rising sea at the same time as the reefs and mangroves that shelter them are under stress. I measured both across 5 island groups in 3 ocean basins (Maldives, Lakshadweep, Seychelles, Fiji and the Canary Islands), testing mangroves and coral reefs as separate pathways. Exposure is the share of people (WorldPop 2020) living on land at or below 1 m, on a bare earth elevation [...]
Testing the Fluorescence Advantage: Does Solar-Induced Fluorescence Signal Agricultural Drought Earlier than NDVI in Marathwada, India?
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
India uses rainfall deficits and vegetation indices such as NDVI to declare drought, and PMFBY crop-insurance payouts depend on these declarations. Solar-Induced Fluorescence (SIF) is linked to photosynthesis, so many expect it to show drought stress earlier than NDVI. I tested this in the eight districts of Marathwada, Maharashtra, over nine Kharif seasons (2015–2023). I compared [...]
Stolen Strata: Brick Kilns and the Loss of Karewa Tableland in Budgam, Kashmir,1993–2025, with a Correction to an Earlier Estimate
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Karewa tablelands are the flat-topped, scarp-bounded remnants of the old lake and river deposits of the Kashmir Valley. Reporting from Kashmir has said for years that they are being dug away for brick clay and fill, but I did not find a satellite measurement of how much, where and when. This study asks three questions: how much karewa tableland that was vegetated in 2013–2015 is no longer [...]
Ghost Infrastructure: Historical Industrial Geography and the Persistence of Path-Dependent Accessibility in Bochum, Germany
Published: 2026-09-04
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: 2026-09-03
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: 2026-08-16
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 [...]