Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Published: 2021-02-25
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Diversity, at every step along the scientific path, drives innovative research. Scientific societies, like the Geochemical Society (GS) and the European Association of Geochemistry (EAG), have a significant influence on which innovators are celebrated. Such choices have the consequence of shaping the future of research, and so are responsible for the evolution of our discipline and its [...]
Published: 2021-02-10
Subjects: Education, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Diversity drives innovation. When professional organizations allow gender inequity to persist, they continually lose talented, valuable individuals who drive economic growth and profits. According to membership data collected by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the Geological Society of America (GSA) there is evidence of continued [...]
Published: 2021-01-30
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human foot traffic in urban environments provides essential information for city planners to manage the urban resources and urban residents to plan their activities. Compared to camera or mobile-based solutions, seismic sensors detect human footstep signals with fewer privacy concerns. However, seismic sensors often record signals generated from multiple sources, particularly in an urban outdoor [...]
Published: 2020-12-21
Subjects: Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Adapting to sea level rise, climate change, and associated effects is especially challenging in sensitive small-island environments where false adaptation can lead to adverse impacts on natural and societal dynamics. Framing and interest play a decisive role for the successful implementation of any adaptation measures. An interdisciplinary perspective on the interaction of natural dynamics, [...]
Published: 2020-12-21
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ecosystem markets are proliferating around the world in response to increasing demand for climate change mitigation and provision of other public goods. However, this may lead to perverse outcomes, for example where public funding crowds out private investment or different schemes create trade-offs between the ecosystem services they each target. The integration of ecosystem markets could address [...]
Published: 2020-12-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Because the 2015 Paris Agreement will not prevent dangerous climate change, there is an urgent need to develop an alternative mitigation strategy. Even if all national commitments are met and technological breakthroughs accelerate the transition to emission-free technologies, the 2°C target will still be overshot due to systemic inertia from existing greenhouse gases, warming oceans, and the [...]
Published: 2020-12-16
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth’s climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for prediction. Estimating the effects of past, current, and potential future emissions to only 2100 is therefore [...]
Published: 2020-12-16
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Drivers of environmental change are causing novel combinations of pressures on ecological systems. Prediction in ecology often uses understanding of past conditions to make predictions to the future, but such an approach can breakdown when future conditions have not previously been encountered. Individual-based models (IBMs) consider ecological systems as arising from the adaptive behaviour and [...]
Published: 2020-12-12
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In Spring 2020, COVID-19 led to an unprecedented halt in public and economic life across the globe. In an otherwise tragic time, this provides a unique natural experiment to investigate the environmental impact of such a (temporary) ``de-globalization". Here, we estimate the medium-run impact of a battery of COVID-19 related lockdown measures on air quality across 162 countries, going beyond the [...]
Published: 2020-11-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Other Environmental Sciences, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a principal component of global climate variability known to influence a host of social and economic outcomes, but its systematic effects on human health remain poorly understood. We estimate ENSO’s association with child nutrition at global scale by combining variation in ENSO intensity from 1986-2018 with children’s height and weight from 186 surveys [...]
Published: 2020-10-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistical Methodology
A large literature on “detection and attribution” has now demonstrated the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions on a range of physical climate variables. Social and economic outcomes are known to be sensitive to climate change, but directly connecting observed changes to anthropogenic forcing is challenging. Here I demonstrate that changes in global productivity of maize, wheat, [...]
Published: 2020-07-12
Subjects: Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Institutional reviews typically rely on scientometrics, like the h-index and impact factors of their participants, to assess research productivity. Productivity is not the only review criterion however, and scientometrics can be difficult to generate and compare in multidisciplinary settings. “Distant reading” methods from the Digital Humanities can complement the current quantitative evaluation [...]
Published: 2020-07-10
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
The area of the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC) follows the foothills and piedmont zones around the northern limits of Asia’s interior mountains, connecting two important areas for human evolution: the Fergana valley and the Siberian Altai. Prior research has suggested the IAMC may have provided an area of connected refugia from harsh climates during the Pleistocene. To date, this region [...]
Published: 2020-07-08
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Library and Information Science, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistics and Probability
There is an active debate regarding the influence that climate has on the risk of armed conflict, which stems from challenges in assembling unbiased datasets, competing hypotheses on the mechanisms of climate influence, and the difficulty of disentangling direct and indirect climate effects. We use gridded historical non-state conflict records, satellite data, and land surface models in a [...]
Published: 2020-06-18
Subjects: Engineering, Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Object based image analysis (OBIA) has a unique process requirement: relate all the pixels in the segmented images to the vectorized polygons (pixel in polygon). The existing solutions are very slow in finding the pixels in a polygon. This paper proposes a novel algorithm called Two-Pixel-Reference to speed up the process. The algorithm is initially designed for segmented remote sensing images. [...]