recent publications

COVID-19 cases surged in late 2019, leading to worldwide lockdowns that closed non-essential places and activities, industries, and businesses to halt the spread of the virus. Many studies suggested improved air quality during lockdowns. However, these findings often focused on core city limits and did not account for heavy pollution sources outside cities (around the fringe areas), such as factories, power plants, and coal mines, which operated continuously for energy needs even during lockdowns. Therefore, this study quantified and re-analyzed the air quality data using a top-down approach.

This is a working paper. Keeping continuous, long-term data to examine changes in urban surroundings is crucial as cities expand and develop. The DMSP OLS nighttime lights data and the Landsat NDVI were used to create the Normalized Difference Urbanization Index (NDUI), which has proven to be an invaluable resource for studying urban areas. However, DMSP's reach and usefulness are constrained by the fact that data collecting ended in 2014 while VIIRS has continued to collect the nighttime lights data since 2012...

The increasing demand for tropical timber from natural forests has reduced the population sizes of native species such as Cedrela spp. because of their high economic value. To prevent the decline of population sizes of the species, all Cedrela species have been incorporated into Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The study presents information about the modeled distribution of the genus Cedrela in Peru that aims to...

Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) is the most effective and well-acknowledged drought severity index that particularly determines the long-term drought conditions over the forest and other terrestrial ecosystems. However, the sensitivity of PDSI has not been explored yet based on productivity (i.e., Gross Primary Productivity (GPP)), biophysical parameters (i.e., biomass—Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and greenness content—Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)), and absorbed solar radiation by plants (i.e., fraction of Absorbed Solar Radiation (fAPAR)) over a humid-subtropical forest ecosystem...

A proper Geomorphic study of a region can be useful in understanding past and present environmental circumstances and analyzing potential environmental risks. Careful analysis of morphodynamic processes and existing diagnostic land forms reveal several aspects about the origin, characteristics and possible pattern of morpho-climatic interactions on the landscape over temporal scale, which helps significantly in proper terrain evaluation from societal welfare and integrated management point of view, including environmental risk assessment and disaster management. This paper has made a thorough geomorphic investigation...

High-resolution Forest biophysical parameter estimation is crucial to understand forest structural and functional variability. Moreover, mapping high-resolution biophysical products is significant to capture accurate forest carbon fluxes and understand seasonal variability. The existing biophysical products are coarse in spatial resolution and unable to capture intra-annual variability. In this study, we proposed a random forest machine learning approach embedded in Google Earth Engine to retrieve three major forest biophysical parameters. The training samples were distributed in a 70:30 ratio for model training and validation. The outcome of the work shows promising results that hold a good agreement with SNAP-derived biophysical variables, whereas the agreement is moderate-to-poor for MODIS and VIIRS biophysical products...