Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Natural Resources and Conservation
Factors Affecting Aboveground Carbon Storage in Mixed Oak-Pine Forests: A Multiple Regression Analysis of Southeastern U.S. Forest Inventory Data
Published: 2025-11-02
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Multivariate Analysis, Natural Resources and Conservation, Plant Sciences, Statistical Models
This study investigated the factors affecting aboveground carbon storage in mixed oak-pine forests of the southeastern United States, with a particular focus on the influence of stand age. Using data from 946 Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plots collected from 2009 to 2019, a multiple regression analysis was conducted to determine the relative importance of various forest and topographic [...]
Nature’s role in national security
Published: 2025-10-31
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
The ability of a nation to protect its citizens, institutions, and interests from domestic and foreign threats is one of the foundational responsibilities of any government. However, the ability of sovereign nations to ensure national security for their citizens and institutions has been increasingly challenged by various forms of anthropogenic global change. While the link between climate change [...]
Machine learning approaches to Landsat change detection analysis
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
The Landsat mission has captured images of the Earth’s surface for over 50 years, and the data have enabled researchers to investigate a vast array of different change phenomena using machine learning models. Landsat-based monitoring research has been influential in geography, forestry, hydrology, ecology, agriculture, geology, and public health. When monitoring Earth's surface change using [...]
Global deep learning model for delineation of optically shallow and optically deep water in Sentinel-2 imagery
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
In aquatic remote sensing, algorithms commonly used to map environmental variables rely on assumptions regarding the optical environment. Specifically, some algorithms assume that the water is optically deep, i.e., that the influence of bottom reflectance on the measured signal is negligible. Other algorithms assume the opposite and are based on an estimation of the bottom-reflected part of the [...]
Ecosystem extent mapping in a global monitoring context
Published: 2025-10-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
The vital role of ecosystems in maintaining biosphere stability is now recognised globally. Updates in policy frameworks on biodiversity and environmental decline include information on ecosystem extent (EE) as a core assessment indicator, e.g., the Global Biodiversity Framework indicator A2 ‘Extent of natural ecosystems’. The recently proposed System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – [...]
Support for Forest Conservation Imperatives: A Robust Approach for Multi-dimensional, Spatially Explicit Resilience Assessment
Published: 2025-09-18
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Forest ecosystems are ecologically, socially, and culturally valuable, and are arguably considered essential to global sustainability. Climate change and altered disturbance regimes are threatening the future of forests around the globe. Many countries are coming together to support and implement conservation and monitoring initiatives to improve future prospects for the restoration and [...]
Low-cost autonomous chambers enable high spatial and temporal resolution monitoring of soil CO₂ exchange across landscapes
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Meteorology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Soil Science, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Soil CO₂ flux is a critical component of ecosystem carbon cycling, but due to high cost and mechanistic constraints, existing measurement systems are often limited by trade-offs between resolution (temporal and spatial), and spatial coverage. These constraints hinder efforts to monitor soil fluxes across diverse, heterogeneous landscapes and environmental gradients. 2. We developed Fluxbot [...]
The Global Woody Surface: A Planetary Interface for Biodiversity, Ecosystem Function, and Climate
Published: 2025-08-07
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation
Global woody surfaces span an area nearly equivalent to Earth’s terrestrial land surface and mediate CO2 fluxes three times larger than global fossil fuel emissions and methane uptake comparable to the global soil sink, yet remain absent from ecological research and Earth system models despite their critical roles in biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Geomodelling of multi-scenario non-stationary reservoirs with enhanced GANSim
Published: 2025-08-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology, Mining Engineering, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Reservoir geomodelling is critical for groundwater management, CO₂ storage, geothermal exploitation, and hydrocarbon exploration, yet traditional geostatistical methods like multiple-point statistics (MPS) struggle with simulating complex geological patterns. GANSim, a Generative Adversarial Networks-based geomodelling method, has proven effective for single-scenario stationary reservoirs, but [...]
Exploration of Gold, Copper, Magnetite, Hematite, Manganese, Magnesium, Chromite, Antimony, Bauxite, Industrial soils, Nickel, Cobalt, Lead, Lithium minerals using Landsat8 satellite
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Environmental Education, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Geophysics and Seismology, Mineral Physics, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences
In this study, we provided an accurate and complete method for exploration and analysis of Gold, Copper, Magnetite, Hematite, Manganese, Magnesium, Chromite, Antimony, Bauxite, Industrial soils, Nickel, Cobalt, Lead and Lithium minerals in the desired area. Mineral exploration can be done using the seven bands from Landsat8 satellite images, through combination of different maps, a specific color [...]
Conservation is Coherence: Introducing the Negawatt Philosophy of Lawful Design
Published: 2025-07-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Other Planetary Sciences, Sustainability, Systems Biology
This paper articulates the Negawatt Philosophy, reframing conservation not as omission or moral restraint, but as the structural intelligence that sustains life and preserves biospheric coherence. Modern economies valorise extraction and combustion while treating conservation as invisible absence. Yet thermodynamics reveals life as negentropy—an ordering that defies the drift into entropy’s [...]
Lagged impacts of groundwater pumping on streamflow due to stream drying: Incorporation into analytical streamflow depletion estimation methods
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water management often requires accounting for reductions in streamflow caused by groundwater pumping (‘streamflow depletion’). Since streamflow depletion cannot be quantified from observational data, it is typically modeled. Analytical depletion functions (ADFs) are a low-cost, low-complexity approach for estimating streamflow depletion with utility for decision support, but ADFs adopt several [...]
Agri-food corporations’ role in water sustainability and water resilience of global supply chains
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Agriculture is both a major contributor to water scarcity and highly vulnerable to it. The agri-food sector accounts for approximately 70% of global human water abstraction and 90% of water consumption, with irrigation practices leading to detrimental effects such as reduced streamflow, groundwater depletion, and environmental degradation. As water stress impacts crop and livestock productivity, [...]
Decision-making under uncertainty for shallow geothermal systems in complex subsurface settings: application to a low-transmissivity aquifer
Published: 2025-05-08
Subjects: Geology, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability
Excess thermal energy can be stored in the subsurface and recovered when needed to heat and cool buildings sustainably. Aquifer thermal energy storage systems (ATES) are gaining popularity worldwide. Most operational systems are located in thick productive aquifers. Their efficiency and wide applicability have been proven and there is now a tendency to explore more complex settings. Aquifers with [...]
From natural variability to flow homogenisation: how dams, water diversions, and climate change reduced seasonal flows in Australia’s Murrumbidgee River
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
River regulation and climate change have profoundly altered seasonal flow dynamics globally, with cascading ecological impacts on freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity. Magnitude and timing are key components of the flow regime, connecting rivers with floodplains and driving feeding and breeding cues for aquatic organisms. We investigated the separate and combined effects of water resource [...]