Preprints
There are 6068 Preprints listed.
Methodological Concerns Regarding RSPO Certification and Plantation Efficiency in Malaysia. A commentary on "Sustainable Palm Oil Certification Inadvertently Affects Production Efficiency in Malaysia" by Zachlod et al. (2025).
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Sustainability
This commentary is in response to the recent article by Zachlod et al. (2025), Sustainable palm oil certification inadvertently affects production efficiency in Malaysia published in Communications Earth & Environment, 6(1), 200. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02150-2. It concludes that Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification leads to reduced plantation efficiency in [...]
Cooling Performance: Exploring the Heat Mitigation Effect of Urban Trees with Computer Vision
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Other Computer Sciences
Rising summer temperatures are placing increasing pressure on many cities to adapt public spaces for heightened heat stress. While the cooling benefits of urban trees are well documented, there remains a limited understanding of how these effects vary across tree types, morphologies, and urban contexts. This study addresses this knowledge gap by employing computer vision techniques to analyze [...]
Surging glaciers in Svalbard: Observing their distribution, characteristics and evolution
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Geomorphology, Glaciology
Glacier surges are episodes of significantly increased ice flow due to ice-dynamical feedbacks, and are often repeated in a quasi-periodical manner. Ice mass is redistributed during a surge, which leads to surface lowering at high elevation as ice is transferred down-glacier and thickening nearer the terminus. In this paper, we review different approaches for monitoring and detecting glacier [...]
Megadyke propagation down dynamic topography
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Magmatic dykes that align vertically and extend laterally for hundreds to thousands of kilometres are known as megadykes. Observations of solidified swarms of megadykes suggest the dykes propagate away from a common source. We hypothesize that megadyke propagation is driven by dynamic topography above a buoyant mantle plume. We develop a model describing lateral dyke propagation from a [...]
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
High-resolution Digital Terrain Model and Land-surface Parameters of São Sebastião and Ilhabela, southeastern Brazil
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Effective disaster risk management and detailed environmental studies in landslide-prone regions require high-resolution and accurate Digital Terrain Models (DTMs). This work describes the development of a 2~m-resolution lidar-based DTM and an extensive set of land-surface parameters (LSPs) for the municipalities of São Sebastião and Ilhabela, southeastern Brazil. The dataset was generated from [...]
An Ice Core Snapshot of Past Atmospheric Chemistry in Mt. Everest’s 'Death Zone'
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Glaciology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present a unique atmospheric chemistry record from the highest ice core ever recovered (8020 m, South Col Glacier (SCG), Mt. Everest), that captures ~400 years of deposition during the latter half of the first millennium BCE. Due to recent glacier thinning, the upper ~2000 years of accumulation have been lost, however, this is the only ice core record ever recovered from the “Death Zone [...]
Finding Inter-species Associations on Large Citizen Science Datasets
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Determining associations among different species from citizen science databases is challenging due to observer behavior and intrinsic density variations that give rise to correlations that do not imply species associations. This paper introduces a method that can efficiently analyze large datasets to extract likely species associations. It tiles space into small blocks chosen to be of the [...]
How do climate, geomorphology, and land-use control sediment yield generation in an anthropogenically modified landscape?
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Sedimentology
Understanding the controls on sediment yield (SY) is essential for water resource management. However, in the Cauvery basin in India, progress is hindered by fragmented studies that lack an integrated analysis. This research quantifies sub-catchment SY using long-term gauging data and employs Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) and multiple regression (MLR) to evaluate geomorphic, climatic, [...]
Newly discovered active faults in the Wairarapa Valley: Implications for multi-fault rupture and kinematics in the southern North Island, Aotearoa New Zealand
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Active fault locations and constraints on the timing and size of earthquakes are important for understanding and mitigating seismic hazard in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, historical and instrumental records are too short to provide these data on most earthquake-generating faults. Light detection and ranging (lidar) data provide us with the ability to locate and describe active faults and [...]
Turkana’s Boiling Bowl: Extreme Heat and Social Norms fuel Gender Inequality
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Climate change impedes human and economic development globally. The frequency, intensity, and duration of climate extremes, including droughts, floods, heatwaves and cyclones, pose significant threats to health, nutrition, water access, livelihoods and ecosystems. Due to escalating extreme weather events, more populations are becoming vulnerable with women and girls increasingly exposed to [...]
Assessing inversion uncertainty from initial model variability: A practical approach for geothermal MT exploration
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Power and Energy
We propose a simple and computationally efficient approach to evaluate the uncertainty in magnetotelluric (MT) inversion results arising from differences in initial models. Spatially smooth initial resistivity structures are generated by assigning random resistivity values to fixed representative points and applying Kriging-based interpolation. A series of 3D inversions was conducted using these [...]
Geological CO2 storage assessment in emerging CCS regions: Review of sequestration potential, policy development, and socio-economic factors in Poland
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Emerging carbon capture and storage (CCS) markets face critical challenges in developing systematic methodologies to assess geological CO2 storage potential under conditions of limited data availability, evolving regulatory frameworks, and nascent infrastructure development. This study establishes an assessment framework designed for lower-maturity CCS regions, using Poland as a representative [...]
Trade-offs Between Discretization Approaches in Urban Stormwater Modeling: Accuracy, Interpretability, and Practical Implications
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Stormwater models are important tools for urban drainage design, planning, and analysis, but their performance and interpretation depend heavily on how spatial discretization is handled. This study evaluates the influence of two common discretization strategies – topography- and sewer geometry-based – on hydrological representation and simulation accuracy in the Storm Water Management Model [...]
Development of an Integrated Geological-Engineering Framework for Assessing the Heat Extraction Potential from the Geopressured Wilcox Reservoir on the Gulf Coast of Texas
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Engineering
This study aims to establish a comprehensive framework for evaluating the geothermal potential of High-Pressure and High-Temperature (HPHT) aquifers or geopressured geothermal reservoirs in the Wilcox Formation on the onshore Gulf Coast of Texas, USA. The framework integrates geological and engineering approaches to determine the feasibility and viability of harnessing geothermal energy from [...]