Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Forest Sciences
Land Use Change, Spillovers, and Transitions: Global Trends, Prospects, and Emerging Drivers
Published: 2026-10-10
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
In this review, we first compile data on global trends and rates of major land use changes over the recent decades, and summarize the main insights revealed by these data. We then review recent research and quantitative estimates on key land use spillover processes, i.e., leakage, indirect land use change, rebound effect and land sparing, and agglomeration economies. We then turn to the [...]
A vertical vegetation structure model of the Earth
Published: 2026-10-06
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Wood Science and Pulp, Paper Technology
Knowing the global distribution of vegetation structure is an essential prerequisite to better quantify, model, and manage carbon, water, energy, and biodiversity in the Earth system. Despite its recognized importance, vertical structure measurements remain sparse at global scales, limiting our understanding of the links between structure and ecosystem functions and resilience. Here we present [...]
Fixed-ground multisensor monitoring resolves longitudinal vegetation condition and fuel-state structure in Southern California chaparral and oak scenes
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Wildfire-relevant vegetation and fuel conditions evolve through interacting changes in vegetation condition, three-dimensional fuel structure, thermal response, and atmospheric drying, yet these dimensions are commonly monitored separately. This study evaluated repeated fixed-ground multisensor monitoring at two fixed vegetation scenes in Placerita Canyon, California. Multispectral imaging, [...]
Forecasting the moisture content of live forest fuels with a transformer machine learning model and Sentinel-2 satellite data
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Hydrology, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Live fuel moisture content (LFMC) provides an indicator of vegetation flammability, the potential for canopy dieback from drought, and habitat quality for arboreal fauna. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have increased the potential in meteorological forecasts for Earth surface forecasting. Combining weather forecasts with remotely sensed LFMC offers a promising avenue for short and [...]
Geospatial Foundation Models for forest diversity mapping in structurally complex, species-rich forests
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Forest Sciences
Foundation-model satellite embeddings have been proposed as transferable, analysis-ready predictors for Earth Observation, yet their value for biodiversity mapping in forest ecosystems remained unclear. This study addresses three main methodological gaps as one of the first applications of foundation-model embeddings to forest diversity mapping in structurally complex forests: (i) a head-to-head [...]
Testing the Fluorescence Advantage: Solar-Induced Fluorescence as an Early Indicator of Agricultural Drought Stress in Marathwada, Maharashtra
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 [...]
Sub-pixel Canopy Phenology reveals divergent Spring transition sequences in Tropical Mixed Deciduous Forest
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
Vegetation phenology regulates terrestrial carbon uptake and land–atmosphere interactions, and is commonly inferred from satellite-derived vegetation indices such as the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI). However, these observations represent spatially aggregated signals that mask phenological variability among individual tree canopies in [...]
Leveraging satellite embeddings and national expert annotations for country-level forest land use mapping
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Spatially explicit information on forest as a land use can support climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation actions, as well as supply-chain regulations, but many countries lack recent forest maps consistent with international definitions. Here, we assess a simple and accessible workflow for country-level Forest/Non-Forest mapping using expert reference labels from the FAO Forest [...]
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, [...]
A Photogrammetric Method for Volume Correction of Soil Core Samples
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Forest Sciences
Soil volume is an important reference value that is often determined through standardized sampling cylinders. Methods exist for measuring missing soil volume, but they either modify the sample or are time-consuming. Our new method uses structure-from-motion photogrammetry to create a 2.5D model of the soil-filled sampling cylinders from which the missing volume can be determined. We quantified [...]
Valley forests as ecological bottlenecks: Topography and resource concentration structure herbivore use in the Western Ghats
Published: 2026-06-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Large-herbivore distributions in the Western Ghats are often interpreted through the perspective of protected areas, forest loss, and human disturbance. This perspective can undermine the ecological role of valley forests and riparian lowlands in steep, human-modified landscapes. Evidence from Asian elephants and other large herbivores indicates that habitat use is shaped by interacting filters [...]
Deforestation Edge Effects on Soil Moisture Persistence in the Amazon Basin: Observational Evidence for Lateral Hydrological Degradation and Minimum Viable Restoration Scales
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Hydrology
Deforestation in the Amazon basin degrades not only the cleared land but also the hydrological function of adjacent intact forest. Here we combine 10 years of SMAP Level 4 root-zone soil moisture (9 km, 2015 to 2024) with Hansen Global Forest Change data (30 m) to quantify how proximity to deforestation edges affects soil moisture persistence in intact forest across the Amazon basin. We classify [...]
Global forest typology at 10-meter resolution for forest and land-use monitoring
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Distinguishing forest types---primary, naturally regenerating, planted, and plantation forests---from agricultural tree crops and other land uses is essential for carbon accounting, biodiversity assessment, conservation planning, and supply-chain regulation. However, no existing global dataset resolves this typology at high spatial resolution. We present the Forest Typology (ForTy) v1 dataset, a [...]
Remote sensing and deep learning for standing dead-tree detection and mapping: A review of advances, challenges, and future directions
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Standing dead trees are visible indicators of recent tree mortality and an important transitional component linking forest disturbance to future lying deadwood, habitat availability, and carbon storage. As drought, insect outbreaks, pathogens, and climate extremes intensify tree mortality worldwide, scalable methods are needed to detect and map standing dead trees consistently across forest [...]
Scale-dependent controls on forest carbon uptake across hydroclimatic extremes
Published: 2026-04-28
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Sustainability
Conifer forests span some of the most climatically contrasting environments on Earth, from energy-limited Boreal systems to water-limited semi-arid ecosystems. Whether their carbon uptake is governed by universal drivers or by site-specific boundary conditions remains unresolved. Using more than two decades of eddy-covariance and multi-depth soil moisture measurements from two climatic [...]