Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Human Geography
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, [...]
Dress Rehearsal: 2023 El Niño Anticipatory Action Somalia, in the Shadow of 1997
Published: 2026-06-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Meteorology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography
In 2023 Somalia saw the largest-ever scale of anticipatory action (AA) linked to a seasonal forecast. $24m was spent on preparedness and early response, based on forecasted flooding driven by El Niño and a positiveIn 2023 Somalia saw the largest-ever scale of anticipatory action (AA) linked to a seasonal forecast. $24m was spent on preparedness and early response, based on forecasted flooding [...]
Unequal weather exposure across teams and groups at the 2026 FIFA World Cup: an event-based analysis using hourly reanalysis
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Studies, Human Geography
The connection between climate change and sports is evident, as sports contribute to environmental challenges, while climate change impacts the conditions for playing, organizing, and enjoying sports. In professional football, heat, humidity, rain, wind, and insufficient recovery time at night can influence player health, physical stress, and game performance. Evaluations of the 2026 FIFA World [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Towards Prospective Disaster Risk Management: Mapping Multi-hazard Urban Risk Dynamics Driven by Evolving Exposure and Vulnerability via Earth Observation
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Other Computer Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Risk Analysis, Spatial Science, Structural Engineering
As local governments increasingly adopt geospatial Climate and Disaster Risk Assessment (CDRA) to inform prospective public policy, the reliability of existing static risk intelligence is challenged by the continuous evolution of building exposure, population distribution, and physical vulnerability. Recent multi-temporal datasets of the built environment, derived from Earth Observation, have [...]
City-level temperature reduction from street green space by city typology and climate zone
Published: 2026-03-29
Subjects: Climate, Human Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Vegetation in the street can lower temperatures at neighbourhood level and reduce heat stress for pedestrians. Street green spaces (SGS) is thus an urgently needed nature-based solution for adapting to a warming climate, and also has some ability for carbon uptake. This local solution has global potential, but the cooling potential of street green space depends on local context, urban form and [...]
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 [...]
WITHDRAWN: 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, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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 [...]
The Stotfield silcrete (or ‘Stotfield Cherty Rock’), Moray, eastern Scotland: Characterization and discussion of an archaeologically important lithic raw material
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Human Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We describe and discuss a lithic raw material new to Scottish prehistoric research: the Stotfield silcrete or Stotfield Cherty Rock. This material was well-known to Scottish geologists, but it was only recently realized that it had been used by prehistoric people in Moray, eastern Scotland. We describe our examination of archaeological Stotfield silcrete, as well as field information relating to [...]
Reduced Precipitation on Rapa Nui During the Decline of the Moai Culture
Published: 2025-03-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
From approximately 1200-1600 CE, Polynesian settlers on the island of Rapa Nui engaged in megalithic monument construction, crafting hundreds of Ahu platforms and Moai statues from volcanic bedrock. The decline of this tradition has intrigued archaeologists for decades. The most widely disseminated hypothesis surrounding the demise of the Ahu Moai culture suggests that the Rapanui overexploited [...]