Preprints
There are 6306 Preprints listed.
Why are farmers in South India shifting from conventional ‘Green Revolution’ agriculture to natural farming? A mixed-methods study
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Introduction: The Green Revolution contributed to significant increases in crop production and yield in India. However, it also resulted in negative social and environmental consequences. In response, alternative farming practices have emerged which are based on agroecological principles, such as natural farming. In the recent years government policies at state and national level are also [...]
Modelling the transport and dispersion of volcanic co-PDC ash clouds using NAME: an evaluation of source geometry and mass eruption rate
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Volcanology
Pyroclastic density currents (PDCs) are gravity currents that frequently form during explosive volcanic eruptions. These ground-hugging density currents consist of high-temperature mixtures of pyroclasts (e.g., ash, pumice), lithics, and gas. They have the potential to generate co-PDC plumes, which detach from the underlying PDC as they buoyantly rise into the atmosphere. Co-PDC plumes, composed [...]
Homogenization of Elastic Wave Equation using Renormalization Group Theory
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seismic waves traveling through the Earth interact with heterogeneities of all scales along their path. Generally, we are interested in travel time associated with coarse-scale structures; however, fine-scale structures also influence the amplitude and travel time for all phases. The distribution of fine-scale heterogeneities not only affects travel times but also impacts how we observe [...]
Bending the Sierra Madre Oriental: A Paleocene Orocline
Published: 2025-11-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Tectonics and Structure
The Sierra Madre Oriental belt of the Mexican thin-skinned fold-and-thrust belt, which formed during the Late Cretaceous due to the subduction of the Farallon Plate beneath North America, exhibits a pronounced curvature of approximately 100°, concave to the southwest. A recent paleomagnetic study in Jurassic rocks has classified the curvature of the Sierra Madre Oriental as an orocline. However, [...]
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 [...]
Unexpected canopy gain in Earth’s mangrove forests linked to natural expansion and regrowth
Published: 2025-11-01
Subjects: Forest Sciences
Mangroves have disappeared rapidly due to deforestation and sea-level rise but can also recover through natural regrowth and restoration. However, their long-term trajectory in area and canopy cover remains highly uncertain. By developing a global mangrove canopy density dataset, we show that mangrove loss (conversion to other land uses) and degradation (reduction in canopy density) have been [...]
Hidden in plain sight? Some challenges and needs for practical planetary biosignature exploration, both home and away-A Mini-Review.
Published: 2025-11-01
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Other Earth Sciences, Other Planetary Sciences, Paleobiology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Planetary Geochemistry
Identifying organic molecular biosignatures for life is challenging. Most current analytical methods were developed on Earth sediments rich in total organic carbon (TOC), and these methods struggle when dilute organic matter is situated within reactive, mineralogically complex astrobiological samples. Diverse geological alteration processes degrade biomarker signals, often concealing some [...]
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 [...]
Anomaly detection of Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferograms with semi-supervised machine learning
Published: 2025-10-31
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Volcanology
The aim of this research is to detect Earth's deformation from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) images through a semi-supervised machine learning algorithm called Least-Squares Two-sample Test (LSTT). This algorithm computes the probability distributions of two samples to assess if they belong to the same probability distribution. At the same time, it gives the divergence of these [...]
Unified Cross-Modal Learning for Hydrological Processes Using Multi-Task Transformer Framework
Published: 2025-10-31
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Most deep learning studies in hydrology adopt single-task frameworks that address individual variables such as rainfall or streamflow independently, limiting opportunities for shared learning across related environmental processes. This study introduces a unified multi-task, multi-modal deep learning framework capable of jointly performing 24-hour horizon streamflow forecasting and rainfall [...]
A Weighted Fitting Approach for Diameter Distributions from Horizontal Point Sampling
Published: 2025-10-31
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Horizontal point sampling (HPS) produces size-biased tallies that cannot be fit directly with standard probability distributions without distorting diameter distribution estimates. Previous work resolves this by deriving bespoke size-biased probability density functions (PDFs) for each assumed distribution. We revisit the problem and formalise a weighted non-linear least squares approach that [...]
ForestCast: Forecasting Deforestation Risk at Scale with Deep Learning
Published: 2025-10-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring
Deforestation is a major threat to biodiversity and the stability of the climate. Current monitoring solutions provide reactive alerts only after deforestation has occurred, rendering them largely insufficient for prevention. Proactive deforestation prevention necessitates forecasting at-risk areas, however, previous forecasting efforts have been constrained by their reliance on simple [...]
HydroQuantum: A new quantum-driven Python package for hydrological simulation
Published: 2025-10-31
Subjects: Education, Engineering
Local Prediction of Temperate Forest Structure in Eastern North America Using LiDAR, Radar, and Optical Data
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Forest structure underpins the emergence of ecological patterns and processes yet remains costly and labor-intensive to measure at broad scales. NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission provides three-dimensional Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) measurements at discrete footprints, leaving spatial gaps that complicate wall-to-wall mapping. Few studies have produced [...]
Past, Present and Future of the Indus Water Treaty: Implications for Transboundary Water Governance Challenges and Modernization Prospects
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: International and Area Studies, Physical and Environmental Geography, Water Resource Management
The Indus Water Treaty has been applauded as a successful water sharing agreement to allocate the water of Indus River system between India and Pakistan. Yet a set of diplomatic, water resources, and climatic challenges have culminated into the current state of suspension and raise questions over the future of the transboundary water governance. This paper presents a critical spatio-temporal [...]