Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Natural Resources and Conservation
A global life-cycle inventory database of deforestation area and emissions for agricultural products
Published: 2026-10-26
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Food Science, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Sustainability
Food-system actors are increasingly required to quantify and report the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture-driven deforestation in their supply chains, yet comprehensive, up-to-date and openly accessible data to support such Scope 3 reporting remain scarce. Here we present a harmonized life-cycle inventory (LCI) database of deforestation area and carbon footprints covering 183 agricultural [...]
Monitoring Carbon Hotspots in Patchy Landscapes from Sparse Lidar and Dense Satellite Time Series
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Monitoring aboveground biomass (AGB) stocks as an indicator of carbon storage is essential for climate mitigation, adaptation, and land management. Across much of Earth’s land surface, carbon stocks are concentrated in fine-scale hotspots, including isolated trees in pastures, shrub patches in tundra, and riparian vegetation in drylands. These carbon hotspots are vulnerable to change but are [...]
Workflow for estimating above ground biomass from satellite imagery with non-geolocated ground validation data
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation
Satellite-based aboveground biomass mapping typically relies on validation data from field-based inventory plots or other high resolution ground truthing, but acquiring validation data is challenging. In the United States, the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program is a common source of field validation data for biomass mapping, but currently the US Forest Service is not processing Material [...]
Parcel-Level Deforestation Hazard Rates in the Paraguayan Chaco: A Multi-Scale Empirical Analysis of Annual Clearing Dynamics on Large Cattle Ranches
Published: 2026-10-04
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Cattle ranch expansion across the Paraguayan Chaco generates parcel-level clearing rates that appear inconsistent with regional deforestation statistics, raising concerns that REDD+ baselines constructed from proxy parcels overstate forest loss (a baseline over-crediting debate that turns on denominator consistency between parcel hazard and regional flows). Because parcels undergoing active [...]
What constitutes fine-scale geodiversity? Taxonomic geodiversity mapping across environmental gradients in a sub-Arctic mountain environment
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Geomorphology, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Soil Science
The integration of geodiversity information, i.e., the diversity of abiotic features in the Earth surface and subsurface, into assessments of the sustainability and resilience of natural environments and ecosystems is increasingly considered important. However, geodiversity data is highly scale-dependent and there is an urgent need to find optimal ways on how geodiversity should be quantified and [...]
Predicting Elephant Crop-Raiding with Machine Learning to Inform Conservation Planning: A Case Study Comparing the Performance and Tradeoffs of GeoAI Algorithms in Northwestern Zimbabwe
Published: 2026-09-23
Subjects: Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Human–elephant conflict (HEC) is a persistent socio-environmental challenge arising from the intersection of wildlife ecology, land use change, and development. African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) come into conflict with humans when space and resource needs overlap. Patterns of HEC are complex and the relationships between drivers and conflict are not always linear. In northwestern [...]
A safe and just operating space for water at municipal scale: population, agriculture and mining in Chihuahua, Mexico, to 2050
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water allocation decisions in Mexico are taken municipality by municipality, yet water scarcity is assessed at national or basin scale. We operationalize a safe and just operating space for water for each of the 67 municipalities of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest and driest mining state, with both bounds drawn from national law rather than imposed by the analyst: an ecological ceiling equal to the [...]
BORDER OPTICS : Satellite Verification of India's Vibrant Villages Programme: A Compositing-Window Robustness Assessment of Border-Village Development
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ask the Government of India if things have worked out for them with their flagship scheme for the Border Villages, the honest answer (on parliamentary record) is No, it has never been verified anywhere. The Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP-I) has approved around ₹4,800 crore in support of 2,967 villages in five Himalayan border states/union territories including 662 villages marked 'priority' for [...]
Twin indicators of coastal vulnerability: land subsidence and mangrove extent change in Dili, Timor-Leste
Published: 2026-08-06
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Natural Resources and Conservation
Mangrove forests and land subsidence are major drivers of coastal vulnerability rarely quantified together outside the well-studied deltas of Southeast Asia. This study provides the first satellite-based, twin-indicator assessment of coastal vulnerability for Dili, Timor-Leste, combining Sentinel-1 InSAR time series analysis of land subsidence with Global Mangrove Watch extent change over a [...]
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 [...]
Translation and commentary on Carl Eduard Ney’s (1893/1894) Ueber die Messung des an den Schäften der Bäume herabfliessenden Regenwassers
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
Stemflow is now recognized as a hydrologically consequential pathway, yet much of twentieth-century forest hydrology treated it as negligible. This paper revisits a counterpoint, a formal exchange regarding stemflow between Government and Forestry Councilor C.E. Ney and Imperial-Royal Trainee Dr. E. Hoppe at the first Congress of the International Union of Forestry Research Stations (Mariabrunn, [...]
Direct mapping of plantation forest aboveground biomass change with deep learning and SAR-optical fusion
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation
Accurately tracking changes in forest aboveground biomass (ΔAGB) is necessary for understanding global carbon dynamics. Traditional approaches estimate ΔAGB indirectly by differencing two independent biomass predictions, compounding uncertainty and reducing accuracy. Here, we develop a Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) machine learning framework that uses multi-sensor fusion of Sentinel-1 C-band SAR, [...]
Extreme changes in water level regenerate reed stands and a stable water regime leads to die-off: lessons from the analysis of 40-year satellite time series observations in a shallow lake ecosystem.
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Reed wetlands are key to the productivity of shallow lakes, and their condition is tightly governed by water level variability. Using long-term satellite observations, we provide the first analysis linking hydrology and reed vitality at Lake Neusiedl, a major climate sensitive wetland system in the Pannonian Basin. We assembled a 40-year record (1985–2025) of Landsat derived Enhanced Vegetation [...]
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. [...]
GEDIMetrics: a QGIS plugin for accessing and integrating multi-product GEDI spaceborne LiDAR data
Published: 2026-05-18
Subjects: Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Management, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) provides near-global, high-resolution 3D LiDAR observations of forest vertical structure. However, GEDI products are distributed as independent HDF5 files organised by beam, requiring ad-hoc workflows for data discovery, quality filtering, spatial subsetting, and footprint-level alignment across products. Existing tools either target a single [...]