Digital geological mapping has experienced significant growth over the past three decades due to the advent of commercial geographical information systems, advances in global positioning systems, and the availability of portable hand-held devices, such as mobile personal computers (PCs), smartphones, and tablets. Numerous software packages have been developed to collect, combine, organise, visu…
Land subsidence is a worldwide threat that may cause irreversible damage to the environment and the infrastructures. Thus, identifying and mapping areas prone to land subsidence with accurate methods such as Land Subsidence Susceptibility Index (LSSI) mapping is crucial for mitigating the adverse impacts of this geohazard. Also, Machine Learning (ML) is now becoming a powerful tool to analyze v…
The emission of dust particles, mainly from arid and semi-arid lands, as a result of climate change and human activities, is known to be a global issue. Identifying dust emission sources is the first key step in dealing with the hazardous consequences of this rising phenomenon. This study is an attempt to address one of the major challenges in mapping dust emission sources. Accordingly, an inno…
Inland water bodies play a vital role at all scales in the terrestrial water balance and Earth’s climate variability. Thus, an inventory of inland waters is crucially important for hydrologic and ecological studies and management. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to develop a deep learning-based method for inventorying and mapping inland water bodies using the RGB band of high-resolu…
Previously glaciated landscapes often share similar surficial characteristics, including large areas of exposed bedrock, blankets of till deposits, and alluvium-floored valleys. These materials play significant roles in geologic and hydrologic resources, geohazards, and landscape evolution; however, the vast extents of many previously glaciated landscapes have rendered comprehensive, detailed f…
Rock glaciers (RG) are landforms that occur in high latitudes or elevations and — in their active state — consist of a mixture of rock debris and ice. Despite serving as a form of groundwater storage, they are an indicator for the occurrence of (former) permafrost and therefore carry significance in the research for the ongoing climate change. For these reasons, the past years have shown ri…
In this study we compared various machine learning techniques that used soil geochemistry to aid in geologic mapping. We tested six different sampling methods (undersample, oversample, Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), Adaptive Synthetic Sampling (ADASYN), SMOTE and Edited Nearest Neighbor (SMOTEENN), and SMOTE and Tomek links (SMOTETomek)). SMOTE performed best with ADASYN and…
Using Python-based geospatial analytics, open-source web mapping technologies, geophysical data models, and subsurface stratigraphy models from the Regional Geology Geologic Framework Model database assembled by Los Alamos National Laboratory, we developed a suite of web-based geologic investigation tools to identify and understand subsurface structures and geophysical properties concerning sal…
In recent decades, mountain glaciers have experienced the impact of climate change in the form of accelerated glacier retreat and other glacier-related hazards such as mass wasting and glacier lake outburst floods. Since there are wide-ranging societal consequences of glacier retreat and hazards, monitoring these glaciers as accurately and repeatedly as possible is important. However, the accur…
Crop type and crop extent are critical information that helps policymakers make informed decisions on food security. As the economic growth of Bhutan has increased at an annual rate of 7.5% over the last three decades, there is a need to provide geospatial products that can be leveraged by local experts to support decision-making in the context of economic and population growth effects and impa…