Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Natural Resources and Conservation
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 [...]
Remotely sensed evapotranspiration for corporate water stewardship: Opportunities and limitations in agricultural landscapes
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Corporate water stewardship (CWS), in which companies engage in or incentivize actions to advance sustainable water management, can positively affect water resources, reduce water-related business risks, and support Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and sustainability reporting. Agricultural landscapes affect diverse industries including finance, technology, fuel production, insurance, [...]
From 2D labels to 3D structure: Scalable label transfer and benchmarking of 3D vegetation models in rangeland ecosystems
Published: 2026-05-02
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
Three-dimensional (3D) characterisation of vegetation structure at the level of individual growth forms is critical for understanding ecosystem function and resilience, yet remains challenging in rangelands because vegetation is sparse, low-stature, and structurally heterogeneous. Recent 3D deep-learning models perform strongly in forests, but their transfer beyond closed-canopy benchmarks is [...]
Soil-informed multivariate decision support to assess urban ecosystem service potential
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Dynamical Systems, Multivariate Analysis, Natural Resources and Conservation, Remote Sensing, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Theory and Algorithms
Metropolitan expansion across Africa requires robust soil information to support ecosystem services and urban resilience. However, digital soil mapping often prioritises predictive accuracy over identifying where information is reliable for decision making. This study evaluated numerical and South African Soil Taxonomy within a decision framework to assess where ecosystem service inferences can [...]
Changes in soil moisture availability and water yield in response to longleaf pine restoration in southeast Texas
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Our study, based in Trinity County, Texas, focused on whether strategic management of longleaf pine forest could promote a less water-intensive land cover type. We modeled soil evapotranspiration (ET) by measuring vertically stratified soil moisture (15-120 cm) across five forest monitoring sites, four of which received restoration treatments, and one served as a control. Forest attributes, [...]
Satellite Validation of Citizen Science Marine Pollution Data: Multi-Site Correlation Analysis of Sentinel-2 Floating Debris Index and EyeSea Ground-Truth Reports
Published: 2026-03-27
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation
We present the first multi-site correlation analysis between the Sentinel-2 Floating Debris Index (FDI) and community-reported marine pollution data from the EyeSea citizen science platform. Across three geographically diverse coastal sites—Vasai-Virar (India), Santa Cruz, Galápagos (Ecuador), and Puerto Montt (Chile)—8,123 geotagged beach pollution reports were analysed against 91 Sentinel-2 L2A [...]
Geospatial Modelling of Vegetation Dynamics and Carbon Sequestration Capacity in Ekiti State, Nigeria Using MODIS Data and CASA Models.
Published: 2026-03-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Accurate estimation of terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity is fundamental to national climate mitigation efforts and achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study assessed vegetation dynamics and modelled Net Primary Productivity (NPP) a proxy for carbon sequestration capacity in Ekiti State, Nigeria, over the 11-year period (2014–2024). The study deployed the seasonal and [...]