TerraMosaic Daily Digest: May 24, 2026
Daily Summary
May 24 is dominated by papers that treat hazards as coupled transitions rather than isolated events. The strongest studies map where forest carbon projects are exposed to climate-driven reversal, quantify abrupt drought-flood alternations at global scale, and resolve how ice-debris complexes, sinkholes, liquefiable soils, subsiding cities, and shield-tunnel leakage move from gradual change into damaging states. The landslide-adjacent center of gravity lies in slope, cryosphere, hydrologic, and underground-infrastructure hazards: internal ice-debris structure, sinkhole early warning, three-phase MPM liquefaction, stress-temperature frozen-soil plasticity, and retaining-wall or tunnel response under infiltration, seepage, and seismic loading all sharpen the mechanics of failure.
A second axis is measurement. CYGNSS tropical-cyclone winds, wetland methane emulators, wood-restoration channel-incision records, phosphorus gain-loss mapping, InSAR subsidence, SAR/PINN flood inference, LiDAR and hyperspectral infrastructure inspection, and high-latitude land-cover products convert difficult environmental states into datasets or physically interpretable observables. AI appears most useful when it is constrained by physics, uncertainty, or domain shift: flood mapping is penalized for hydrologically impossible outputs, remote-sensing segmentation reduces annotation load, and Nature's agentic scientific systems suggest how future geohazard workflows may automate hypothesis generation without replacing field-grounded validation.
Key Trends
The papers converge on five methodological moves: identifying thresholds before abrupt hazard transition, resolving cold-region structure, building large process-aware datasets, modelling coupled underground infrastructure response, and forcing AI outputs to respect physics, uncertainty, or domain transfer.
- Hazard thresholds are being recast as state transitions: Forest carbon reversal, drought-flood alternation, sinkhole collapse, liquefaction, shield-tunnel leakage, frozen-soil deformation, and nebkha degradation all emphasize the conditions that move systems from storage or stability into abrupt loss, failure, or transport.
- Cryosphere and cold-region work links structure to mechanics: Ice-debris complexes, Tibetan lake-glacier hydrology, frozen-soil elastoplasticity, pile vibration in frozen ground, and alpine nitrogen cycling connect thermal state, ice content, hydrology, and mechanical response.
- Hydrologic hazards increasingly rely on coupled datasets and process-aware models: Global drought-flood alternations, tropical-cyclone winds, phosphorus gain-loss, dryland sediment loads, overland-flow hydraulics, channel geometry, river confluence flow, groundwater conservation, and agricultural water-scarcity analysis turn sparse monitoring into risk-relevant variables.
- Underground and transportation infrastructure papers focus on coupled loading: Sinkholes, pipe-soil interaction, underwater shield face stability, hydrate-bearing sediments, tunnel leakage, curved-tunnel seismic response, retaining-wall seepage, deep excavations, pile dynamics, and railway subgrades are treated as soil-water-structure systems rather than isolated components.
- AI is strongest where it is physically bounded or transfer-aware: PINN flood inference, InSAR subsidence weighting, semi-supervised remote-sensing segmentation, GL-Geoformer ENSO prediction, wildfire severity ordinality, and agentic scientific systems all foreground uncertainty, domain shift, or structured reasoning.
Selected Papers
This issue contains 88 selected papers from 2,340 papers analyzed. The leading papers quantify transitions into damage: climate-driven forest carbon reversal, abrupt drought-flood alternation, ice-debris internal change, dewatering-induced cover-collapse sinkholes, unsaturated-soil liquefaction, coastal land subsidence, flood-inference uncertainty, tropical-cyclone inner-core winds, erosive-energy thresholds, frozen-soil stress-temperature coupling, and shield-tunnel leakage. The wider set links hydrologic extremes, cryosphere change, sediment mobility, wildfire, groundwater and nutrient transport, remote-sensing observables, and geotechnical infrastructure response into datasets or models that can be used directly in hazard assessment.
1. Forest carbon protocols underestimate climate-driven carbon loss risks
Core Problem: Forest carbon-credit projects often under-account for climate-driven disturbance losses, making buffer-pool sizing unreliable under warming, drought, fire, insects, and wind.
Key Innovation: A Nature study combines forest inventory data, satellite disturbance records, modelling, and machine learning to map reversal risk across the contiguous United States and show that current carbon protocols underestimate climate-driven carbon loss.
2. Unravelling global patterns of drought-flood alternations
Core Problem: Abrupt transitions between drought and flood are among the most damaging compound hydroclimate sequences, yet their global frequency, directionality, and co-occurrence patterns remain poorly quantified.
Key Innovation: A Journal of Hydrology study maps drought-to-flood and flood-to-drought alternations worldwide from 1981 to 2023, showing widespread and increasingly concurrent abrupt transitions in both directions.
3. Deciphering transitions within ice–debris complexes in the Northern Tien Shan through surface characteristics and internal structure
Core Problem: Rock glaciers embedded within glacier-moraine-forefield complexes can shift between ice-rich and debris-rich states, but surface indicators alone cannot reliably diagnose internal structure.
Key Innovation: Earth Surface Processes and Landforms combines surface characteristics with internal-structure observations to decipher transitions within Northern Tien Shan ice-debris complexes.
4. Effects of depositional heterogeneity on cover-collapse sinkholes resulting from engineering dewatering in the Pearl River Delta (China): Risk assessment and early warning methodology
Core Problem: Dewatering-induced cover-collapse sinkholes in heterogeneous alluvial plains are difficult to anticipate because depositional architecture strongly controls subsurface voiding and collapse pathways.
Key Innovation: Engineering Geology links depositional heterogeneity to collapse susceptibility in the Pearl River Delta and develops a risk-assessment and early-warning methodology for engineering dewatering.
5. A stabilized three-phase two-point MPM for unsaturated soils: Validation and application based on liquefaction analyses
Core Problem: Liquefaction analysis in unsaturated soils requires simultaneous soil, water, and air dynamics, but existing material point methods can suffer from unstable boundaries and algorithmic simplifications.
Key Innovation: A stabilized three-phase two-point MPM framework improves hydraulic boundary treatment and validates large-deformation unsaturated-soil simulations through liquefaction analyses.
6. Land Subsidence Detection in Penang Island Using PS-SBAS InSAR with Adaptive Machine Learning-Based Weighting
Core Problem: Rapidly developing coastal cities need reliable subsidence monitoring, but InSAR time-series estimates are sensitive to scatterer density, weighting choices, and local deformation heterogeneity.
Key Innovation: Remote Sensing integrates PS-SBAS InSAR with adaptive machine-learning-based weighting to detect land subsidence across Penang Island, Malaysia.
7. Overcoming "Physics Shock" in Earth Observation A Heteroscedastic Uncertainty Framework for PINN-based Flood Inference
Core Problem: Flood-mapping neural networks can produce physically impossible water extents, while rigid physics-informed constraints can fail under noisy real-world SAR observations.
Key Innovation: An arXiv Earth-observation study proposes a heteroscedastic uncertainty framework for PINN-based flood inference to reduce hydrologically inconsistent predictions from remote-sensing data.
8. A global kilometre-scale tropical cyclone inner-core vector wind field dataset from CYGNSS observations
Core Problem: Tropical cyclone intensity, surge, and structure studies need high-resolution inner-core vector winds, but satellite retrievals are often sparse, scalar, or basin-limited.
Key Innovation: Earth System Science Data presents a global kilometre-scale tropical cyclone inner-core vector wind dataset derived from CYGNSS observations with precipitation-penetrating L-band sampling.
9. Effects of soil and water conservation measures on energy–sediment dynamics of erosive runoff in Chinese Loess Plateau catchments
Core Problem: Soil and water conservation structures alter erosive energy and sediment transport, but their coupled hydrodynamic thresholds remain difficult to quantify at catchment scale.
Key Innovation: Catena compares treated and untreated Loess Plateau catchments to quantify how conservation measures reshape stream power, runoff energy, and sediment-dynamic thresholds.
10. Distinct impacts of tropical North Atlantic warming flavors on cross-basin tropical cyclone activity
Core Problem: North Atlantic warming can either enhance Atlantic cyclone genesis or suppress Northwest Pacific activity, but different warming patterns have not been cleanly separated.
Key Innovation: Science Advances distinguishes coastal and warm-pool tropical North Atlantic warming flavors and shows their different local thermodynamic and remote dynamical effects on tropical cyclone formation.
11. A non-orthogonal elastoplastic model for frozen soil with stress and temperature as dual constitutive variables
Core Problem: Frozen-soil mechanics depend jointly on stress and temperature, but treating temperature as an external condition limits constitutive prediction under warming or freezing cycles.
Key Innovation: Computers and Geotechnics develops a non-orthogonal elastoplastic model that treats stress and temperature as dual constitutive variables controlling pore-ice behavior and deformation.
12. Modelling leakage disasters in shield tunnels: evolution mechanisms and mitigation strategies
Core Problem: Leakage disasters threaten shield-tunnel stability through coupled water, soil, and structural deformation that are difficult to reproduce with uncoupled models.
Key Innovation: Transportation Geotechnics proposes an S-CEL coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian method to simulate complete shield-tunnel leakage progression and evaluate mitigation strategies.
13. An explicit surrogate model for real-time reliability assessment of face stability in underwater slurry shield tunneling
Core Problem: Face stability in underwater slurry-shield tunnelling must be evaluated quickly despite spatially variable geotechnical properties and stochastic face-support conditions.
Key Innovation: Reliability Engineering & System Safety introduces an explicit surrogate model for real-time reliability assessment of underwater slurry-shield face stability.
14. Machine-learning-based estimates of global natural vegetated wetland methane emissions (2000–2025)
Core Problem: Natural wetland methane budgets are usually delayed by years, limiting timely interpretation of climate-carbon feedbacks and hydrologic emission anomalies.
Key Innovation: Earth System Science Data provides a machine-learning emulator workflow for monthly global natural vegetated wetland methane emissions from 2000 to 2025.
15. Decoupled lake-glacier hydrological responses to Holocene climate forcing on the central Tibetan Plateau
Core Problem: Lake and glacier responses to monsoon and westerly forcing on the Tibetan Plateau can be decoupled, complicating interpretation of cryosphere-water storage changes.
Key Innovation: Catena reconstructs central Tibetan lake-glacier hydrologic responses to Holocene climate forcing, clarifying asynchronous controls on glacier and lake evolution.
16. Extreme-value forest fire prediction A study of the Loss Function in an Ordinality Scheme
Core Problem: Operational wildfire prediction must identify rare high-severity events despite severe class imbalance and ordinal relationships among severity levels.
Key Innovation: An arXiv study introduces an ordinal classification framework and tests loss-function design for predicting extreme forest-fire severity in France.
17. Seasonal Dependent Relationship of Tropical Cyclone Decadal Variation Between Western North Pacific and North Atlantic
Core Problem: Western North Pacific and North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity are linked by decadal climate variability, but the relationship changes strongly by season.
Key Innovation: Geophysical Research Letters shows that a robust autumn anti-phase relationship weakens in summer because North Atlantic cyclone genesis loses decadal coherence.
18. Subducting Slab Thermo‐Petrologic Structure and Intermediate‐Depth Supra‐Slab Earthquakes Beneath Southern Colombia
Core Problem: Intermediate-depth earthquakes above subducting slabs vary along strike, but the thermo-petrologic controls on dehydration and decoupling depths remain uncertain.
Key Innovation: Geophysical Research Letters combines two-dimensional thermo-petrologic models with seismicity beneath southern Colombia to link supraslab earthquakes to slab dehydration and mantle coupling.
19. Tracking the Trajectory of Alluvial Channel Adjustment Reveals Along‐River Shifts in Sediment Mobility
Core Problem: Downstream river geometry and grain-size scaling are well known across rivers, but along-river trajectories of adjustment and sediment mobility remain underconstrained.
Key Innovation: Geophysical Research Letters combines topobathymetric LiDAR, automated bankfull-width extraction, and field grain-size data along 166 km of the South Fork Eel River.
20. Predicting Head Loss and Hydraulic Roughness of Channel‐Spanning Large Wood Jams
Core Problem: Channel-spanning wood jams can strongly alter flood conveyance and hydraulic resistance, yet their head-loss scaling is difficult to predict.
Key Innovation: Geophysical Research Letters estimates energetic head loss and hydraulic roughness from dimensionless flow, channel, and log-jam characteristics.
21. Anomalous Counterclockwise Turning of the Boundary‐Layer Winds Revealed by Observations From the 356‐m Shenzhen Meteorological Tower
Core Problem: Boundary-layer wind structure controls heavy-rainfall moisture transport, but high-resolution tower observations have revealed turning behavior not captured by common assumptions.
Key Innovation: Geophysical Research Letters uses the 356 m Shenzhen tower, ERA5, and semi-idealized modelling to characterize anomalous counterclockwise wind turning during warm-season rainfall conditions.
22. Poromechanical and Crack Evolution of Olivine‐Rich Rock During Serpentinization
Core Problem: Serpentinization alters rock strength and fracture behavior, but coupled mineral reaction, cracking, and poromechanical softening are not well constrained experimentally.
Key Innovation: Geophysical Research Letters simulates dunite serpentinization and measures bulk-modulus reduction, crack evolution, and mineral-reaction controls on mechanical weakening.
23. A First Attempt at Reconstructing FengYun‐4B Stratified Precipitable Water Using GNSS
Core Problem: FY-4B stratified precipitable-water products remain uncertain, limiting their use for weather and heavy-rainfall forecasting.
Key Innovation: Geophysical Research Letters integrates spherical-cap harmonic analysis, XGBoost total-water correction, and proportional allocation to reconstruct stratified precipitable water with GNSS support.
24. Automated Spectral Deconvolution for Quantitative Dye Tracing
Core Problem: Fluorescent dye tracing is central to karst and fractured-aquifer connectivity studies, but natural organic matter can distort concentration estimates.
Key Innovation: Water Resources Research develops automated spectral deconvolution to separate dye signals from natural fluorescence and improve quantitative breakthrough-curve interpretation.
25. Groundwater Management Amidst a Changing Climate: A More Severe Climate Could Decrease the Value of Groundwater Conservation
Core Problem: Groundwater conservation policies can interact with farmer decisions and climate stress in ways that reduce their expected resilience value.
Key Innovation: Water Resources Research couples an agent-based hydro-economic model with MODFLOW to examine how severe climate futures reshape groundwater conservation outcomes.
26. Response of Hydraulic Parameters in Overland Flow to Combined Cover Types and Coverage
Core Problem: Soil-erosion mitigation depends on how upright and non-upright surface covers jointly alter overland-flow hydraulics.
Key Innovation: Water Resources Research systematically tests combined cover types and coverage percentages to quantify changes in flow resistance and hydraulic parameters relevant to erosion-control design.
27. Evaluating Approximations of River Channel Shape Using a National Cross‐Section Database
Core Problem: Hydrologic models often lack reliable channel cross-section geometry because field surveys and remote-sensing measurements are sparse or incomplete.
Key Innovation: Water Resources Research evaluates channel-shape approximations using 46,971 U.S. cross sections and introduces a probability-density stacking method for representing river geometry.
28. Riverine phosphorus gain and loss across the conterminous United States
Core Problem: Riverine phosphorus gain and loss must be mapped at continental scale to identify water-quality source areas and in-stream retention zones.
Key Innovation: Earth System Science Data compiles hundreds of thousands of phosphorus measurements and estimates phosphate and total phosphorus loads across CONUS catchments.
29. Shifting water scarcities: irrigation alleviates agricultural green water deficits while increasing blue water scarcity
Core Problem: Irrigation can reduce soil-moisture deficits while increasing pressure on blue-water resources, creating a tradeoff for drought adaptation.
Key Innovation: Hydrology and Earth System Sciences quantifies how irrigation alleviates agricultural green-water scarcity while intensifying blue-water scarcity.
30. A multi-agent system for automating scientific discovery
Core Problem: Scientific discovery remains limited by fragmented hypothesis generation, experiment planning, and data interpretation workflows.
Key Innovation: A Nature study introduces Robin, a multi-agent system that automates hypothesis generation and data analysis, showing how agentic workflows could accelerate complex environmental and hazard-science pipelines.
31. Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientist
Core Problem: Scientific hypothesis generation is difficult to scale while preserving critique, refinement, and experimental grounding.
Key Innovation: Nature presents Co-Scientist, a Gemini-based multi-agent system that generates, critiques, and refines novel hypotheses using structured scientific reasoning and test-time compute.
32. Tropical basin interactions reduce spring predictability barrier of ENSO in a deep learning model
Core Problem: The ENSO spring predictability barrier limits seasonal hazard forecasting, and tropical basin interactions are not fully used in deep-learning models.
Key Innovation: Science Advances introduces GL-Geoformer, a global tropical ocean-atmosphere deep-learning model that reduces the spring predictability barrier by incorporating basin interactions.
33. Integrated perspective on ocean carbon cycle: Untangling facts, fluxes, and fictions
Core Problem: Ocean carbon-cycle narratives often overstate individual biological or coastal sinks and obscure the relative sizes of physical and biological fluxes.
Key Innovation: Science Advances synthesizes ocean carbon stocks and fluxes across plankton, coastal ecosystems, fish, whales, plastics, and nonliving reservoirs to clarify climate-mitigation interpretations.
34. Contribution Analysis of Soil Erosion and Future Sustainable Management Zoning in the Wuding River Basin (2001–2024)
Core Problem: Regional soil-erosion control requires spatially explicit attribution and management zoning across long monitoring periods.
Key Innovation: Remote Sensing uses multi-source data to quantify 2001-2024 erosion contributions and future sustainable-management zones in the Wuding River Basin.
35. DLG-GS: Dynamic Lighting-Aware Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting for Weak-Texture Tunnel Scenes
Core Problem: Underground tunnel scenes have weak textures and unstable illumination, reducing the reliability of image-based 3D reconstruction.
Key Innovation: Remote Sensing proposes DLG-GS, a dynamic-lighting-aware real-time 3D Gaussian splatting method for weak-texture tunnel scenes.
36. LiDAR-Guided Semantic 3D Gaussian Splatting for Forest Digital Twins
Core Problem: Forest digital twins need metric-level structure and semantic information, but image-only 3D reconstruction struggles with geometry and ecological interpretability.
Key Innovation: Remote Sensing introduces LiDAR-guided semantic 3D Gaussian splatting for forest digital twins that support biomass and carbon-cycle monitoring.
37. Meteorology-Conditioned High-Resolution Vegetation Forecasting: A Hierarchical Multi-Modal Fusion Network
Core Problem: High-resolution vegetation forecasting in mountains is difficult because topography and meteorology interact at fine scales.
Key Innovation: Remote Sensing develops a hierarchical multimodal fusion network that conditions vegetation forecasts on meteorological information across complex mountain ecosystems.
38. Transformer-Based Individual Tree Crown Detection from Canopy Height Models with Cross-Domain and Self-Supervised Pretraining
Core Problem: Individual tree-crown detection is constrained by limited labelled data and poor cross-domain transfer across forest types and sensors.
Key Innovation: Remote Sensing evaluates transformer detection from canopy-height models using cross-domain and self-supervised pretraining for transferable forest inventory.
39. Using Aerial LiDAR Data to Map Vegetation Structural Types in Arid and Semi-Arid Rangelands
Core Problem: Arid and semi-arid rangelands are widely degraded, but structural vegetation types are difficult to map consistently across heterogeneous landscapes.
Key Innovation: Remote Sensing uses aerial LiDAR to classify vegetation structural types in rangelands and support biotope-scale dryland condition assessment.
40. Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment Framework for Rural Schools in Northwestern Colombia: Integrating App-Based Surveys, Expert Weighting, and Machine Learning
Core Problem: Rural schools often face multi-hazard exposure but lack integrated, field-informed assessment tools that combine local observations with expert weighting.
Key Innovation: International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction integrates app-based surveys, expert weighting, and machine learning to assess multi-hazard disaster risk in 100 rural Colombian schools.
41. A physically-constrained Gaussian spectral decomposition framework for remote sensing estimation of chlorophyll-a and suspended matter retrieval in highly turbid coastal waters
Core Problem: Satellite retrieval of water constituents in turbid coastal waters is difficult because multiple optical constituents interact nonlinearly.
Key Innovation: ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing develops a physically constrained Gaussian spectral-decomposition framework for chlorophyll-a and suspended-matter retrieval.
42. Integrating semi-supervised and active learning for semantic segmentation
Core Problem: Remote-sensing segmentation remains annotation-limited, especially when pixel-level labels are expensive for changing environmental targets.
Key Innovation: Science of Remote Sensing integrates semi-supervised and active learning to reduce labelling burden while improving segmentation model training.
43. Integrated analysis of climate and human drivers of streamflow and sediment load in a dryland river
Core Problem: Dryland rivers have experienced major hydrologic and sedimentary shifts, but climate and human drivers are difficult to disentangle over multidecadal periods.
Key Innovation: Catena analyzes 1956-2024 Weihe River observations to quantify climate and human controls on streamflow and sediment load.
44. Deciphering signals of landscape disturbance in an erosive cohesive-bank creek (late middle ages, southern Spain): The sedimentary sink role of knickpoints
Core Problem: Erosive cohesive-bank creeks can store or release sediment around knickpoints, but disturbance signals are difficult to decode from complex aggradational and erosional archives.
Key Innovation: Catena uses stratigraphy, chronology, and geomorphic analysis of Yeguas Creek to show how knickpoints acted as sedimentary sinks during landscape disturbance.
45. Plant community dynamics driven by nebkha degradation: Succession patterns and their ecological landform implications
Core Problem: Nebkha degradation releases stabilized sediments and can trigger aeolian-disaster cascades, yet vegetation-landform succession after collapse remains poorly understood.
Key Innovation: Catena analyzes degrading Nitraria nebkhas to link plant-community succession with geomorphic instability and desert-oasis margin evolution.
46. Fire history and its response to climate change inferred from a peatland in the Changbai Mountains, Northeast China, during the past 3000 years
Core Problem: Future fire risk in Changbai Mountain peatlands is hard to estimate because long historical fire records are scarce.
Key Innovation: Catena reconstructs 3000 years of fire history using charcoal and burned phytoliths from Baijianghe Peatland to relate fire regimes to climate change.
47. Axial pipe-soil interaction in ductile iron pipelines with push-on joints: An experimental study
Core Problem: Pipeline joints are weak links during earthquakes, yet axial pipe-soil interaction for ductile iron pipelines with push-on joints is insufficiently constrained.
Key Innovation: Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology uses experiments to characterize axial pipe-soil interaction under conditions relevant to seismic activity, ground displacement, and fault rupture.
48. SANISAND-FM: a sand plasticity model with fabric anisotropy and memory surface with emphasis on cyclic liquefaction
Core Problem: Cyclic liquefaction models must represent fabric anisotropy and loading memory without relying on auxiliary constructs that complicate calibration.
Key Innovation: Géotechnique presents SANISAND-FM, a bounding-surface plasticity model with fabric anisotropy and a memory surface for cyclic liquefaction simulation.
49. A time-dependent bounding surface model for overconsolidated unsaturated soils
Core Problem: Time-dependent deformation in overconsolidated unsaturated soils affects tunnels, slopes, and subgrades, but is poorly represented by many constitutive models.
Key Innovation: Computers and Geotechnics proposes an elastic-viscoplastic bounding-surface model incorporating time, suction, and overconsolidation.
50. A coupled THMC model for hydrate-bearing sediments considering gas exsolution
Core Problem: Gas exsolution during hydrate exploitation can impede fluid migration and increase geotechnical hazard risk in hydrate-bearing sediments.
Key Innovation: Computers and Geotechnics couples gas-exsolution theory with a THMC model to represent bubble generation, burst, and migration during hydrate dissociation.
51. An analytical model for subsurface ground motions due to kinematic shear dislocation sources in layered media
Core Problem: Strong-motion records are sparse in many tectonically active regions, while full numerical simulations remain costly for broad scenario analysis.
Key Innovation: Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering derives an analytical model for subsurface ground motions from kinematic shear dislocation sources in layered media.
52. Parametric analyses for the calculation of vulnerability scores used in rapid visual screening of 3D RC frame structures with an energy-based method
Core Problem: Rapid visual screening methods depend on vulnerability scores whose interaction effects across structural deficiencies are often oversimplified.
Key Innovation: Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering recalculates vulnerability scores using three-dimensional reinforced-concrete frame models and an energy-based method.
53. Nonlinear structural seismic strain response prediction model using Informer driven by mode decomposed and bandwidth amplified ground motions
Core Problem: Predicting nonlinear structural strain histories under seismic loading requires models that capture the interaction between ground motion and structural response.
Key Innovation: Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering uses mode-decomposed, bandwidth-amplified ground motions to drive an Informer model for nonlinear seismic strain response prediction.
54. Solution to non-limit state active earth pressure onto retaining wall with narrow backfills for unsaturated cohesive-frictional soils: effect of transient infiltration and steady seepage
Core Problem: Active earth pressure on retaining walls with narrow unsaturated backfills changes under transient infiltration and steady seepage, but common limit-state models miss non-limit behavior.
Key Innovation: Transportation Geotechnics develops a coupled analytical-numerical framework using soil arching and suction-stress-based unsaturated mechanics.
55. Advanced constitutive modelling for deformation prediction of deep excavations in structured soft clay: Experimental validation and parametric analysis
Core Problem: Urban excavations in structured soft clay can be unconservatively predicted when models ignore natural soil structure and stress-path degradation.
Key Innovation: Transportation Geotechnics develops and validates an advanced constitutive model for structured soft clay deformation in deep excavations.
56. Geodynamic analysis of curved tunnels under rayleigh wave loading: a virtual-force analytical model for axial deformation joints and subgrade response
Core Problem: Curved tunnels have longitudinal seismic response modes and joint effects that are poorly captured by transverse-oriented assessment methods.
Key Innovation: Transportation Geotechnics introduces a virtual-force analytical model for curved tunnels with axial deformation joints under Rayleigh-wave loading.
57. Numerical study on the influence of mangrove density and belt width on wave attenuation characteristics under regular waves
Core Problem: Mangrove belts can reduce wave energy, but quantitative design needs density and belt-width controls under controlled hydrodynamic conditions.
Key Innovation: Ocean Engineering uses a DualSPHysics-based three-dimensional numerical wave flume to evaluate how mangrove density and belt width control regular-wave attenuation.
58. Wood restoration results in rapid conversion of a degraded plane‐bed channel, Little River, Washington
Core Problem: Incised mountain channels can remain locked in degraded plane-bed states after wood removal, but the geomorphic rate and spatial pattern of recovery after wood restoration remain uncertain.
Key Innovation: Earth Surface Processes and Landforms documents rapid reversal or reduction of channel incision after wood restoration in Little River, Washington, linking logjam stability to pool formation, sediment-size shifts, and localized aggradation.
59. A Novel Approach Using Multiple Fluorescence Signals and Storm Event Clustering to Identify Riverine Dissolved Organic Matter Source Activation Pathways
Core Problem: High-frequency fluorescence can reveal storm solute pathways, but single-peak approaches miss contrasting source activation mechanisms.
Key Innovation: Water Resources Research clusters 176 storm events with multiple fluorescence signals to identify dissolved-organic-matter activation pathways in an urban headwater.
60. Flow Processes in a Diffluence‐Confluence Unit on a Large‐Shallow River Under Different Discharges
Core Problem: Large river diffluence-confluence units change flow division and mixing with discharge, but field-scale three-dimensional observations remain scarce.
Key Innovation: Water Resources Research measures velocity structure in a Middle Yangtze diffluence-confluence unit under low to high discharges.
61. A Hybrid Biophysical‐Machine Learning Framework for Diurnal Surface Energy Flux Estimation Using Proximal Sensing
Core Problem: Thermal remote sensing of surface energy fluxes is limited by infrequent satellite revisits and sparse validation of diurnal flux dynamics.
Key Innovation: Water Resources Research combines a biophysical surface-energy-balance model with machine learning and proximal sensing for diurnal energy-flux estimation.
62. Future Decline in the Buffering Effect of Canopy Water on Ecosystem Water‐Use Efficiency in Tropical Forests
Core Problem: The role of canopy water in buffering tropical forest water-use efficiency under atmospheric aridity and soil drought is not well constrained.
Key Innovation: Water Resources Research reconstructs latent heat, productivity, and water-use efficiency to assess how canopy water buffering may decline under intensifying water stress.
63. Development of historical maps of land use-land cover, crop type, nutrients, and irrigation across CONUS (1938–2020) at different spatial resolutions
Core Problem: Long-term water-quality and runoff modelling needs historical maps of land use, crops, nutrients, and irrigation across consistent spatial resolutions.
Key Innovation: Earth System Science Data releases the Harmonized Land Nutrient Irrigation Dataset across CONUS from 1938 to 2020.
64. OasisMap30: a 30 m annual land cover dataset of China's oases from 1987 to 2024
Core Problem: Oasis land-cover dynamics are difficult to map annually because oases are fragmented and have frequent land-cover transitions.
Key Innovation: Earth System Science Data provides OasisMap30, a 30 m annual dataset of China's oases from 1987 to 2024.
65. From soil to stream: modeling the catchment-scale hydrological effects of increased soil organic carbon
Core Problem: Increasing soil organic carbon is often proposed for drought adaptation, but catchment-scale hydrological effects remain uncertain.
Key Innovation: Hydrology and Earth System Sciences models how increased soil organic carbon can alter soil-to-stream hydrologic response.
66. Lotus japonicus VIH2 is an inositol pyrophosphate synthase that regulates arbuscular mycorrhiza
Core Problem: High phosphate fertilizer use contributes to runoff and soil-erosion threats to water bodies, but crop-fungal phosphate regulation is incompletely understood.
Key Innovation: Science Advances identifies Lotus japonicus VIH2 as an inositol pyrophosphate synthase regulating arbuscular mycorrhiza under phosphate conditions.
67. Projection for Ecological Carrying Capacity Based on the Interpretable CAXO Model: The Case of China
Core Problem: Regional ecological carrying capacity projections often lack interpretable controls and national-scale spatial consistency.
Key Innovation: Remote Sensing applies an interpretable CAXO model to project ecological carrying capacity across China.
68. Field Validation of Hyperspectral Imaging for Ballast Fouling Assessment
Core Problem: Railroad ballast fouling degrades track performance, but field-scale non-contact assessment methods require validation against conventional tests.
Key Innovation: Remote Sensing validates hyperspectral imaging for ballast fouling assessment using a severely degraded ballast sample from a derailment site.
69. Prior-knowledge-informed extreme learning machine for probabilistic characterization of geotechnical property profile from sparse measurements
Core Problem: Geotechnical property profiles must often be inferred from sparse measurements, producing high uncertainty in site characterization.
Key Innovation: Engineering Geology introduces a prior-knowledge-informed extreme learning machine for probabilistic characterization of geotechnical property profiles.
70. “It won’t happen to me”: Exploring perceptions of wildfire mitigation in Sweden through scenario workshops
Core Problem: Wildfire mitigation depends on how communities perceive everyday landscape features and shared responsibility across land uses.
Key Innovation: International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction uses Swedish scenario workshops to explore perceptions of wildfire mitigation at the wildland-urban interface.
71. Understanding cross-sectoral wildfire risk governance: Lessons from mix-method analysis of the wildfire risk governance in Italy, Greece, and Land Brandenburg
Core Problem: Wildfire risk increasingly crosses land-use, administrative, and sectoral boundaries, challenging fragmented governance systems.
Key Innovation: International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction compares wildfire-risk governance in Italy, Greece, and Land Brandenburg using mixed-method analysis.
72. HERO: A hybrid expert-relational ontology framework for robust decision-making in the risk management of socio-technical systems
Core Problem: Socio-technical systems face cascading risks under time pressure and data scarcity, while static decision frameworks often fail to represent relational knowledge.
Key Innovation: Reliability Engineering & System Safety proposes HERO, a hybrid expert-relational ontology framework for robust risk-management decisions.
73. Semisupervised Deep Embedded Clustering for Elliptical Decision Boundaries toward CPT Soil Classification
Core Problem: Reliable subsurface stratigraphy depends on soil classification from CPT data, but laboratory-based labels are sparse and real-time classification remains difficult.
Key Innovation: The Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering applies semi-supervised deep embedded clustering with elliptical decision boundaries for CPT soil classification.
74. Shallow-water reef detection driven by few-shot learning with airborne LiDAR bathymetry
Core Problem: Shallow-water reefs create grounding and navigation risks, but conventional sonar and multibeam surveys struggle to deliver scalable high-precision detection.
Key Innovation: ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing uses few-shot learning with airborne LiDAR bathymetry to detect shallow-water reefs.
75. A novel multi-source attention-enhanced transformer U-net for sea surface salinity retrieval based on remote sensing data in the Northwest Pacific
Core Problem: Sea-surface salinity retrieval from L-band satellite data is degraded by radio-frequency interference and coastal contamination.
Key Innovation: International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation develops a multi-source attention-enhanced transformer U-Net for Northwest Pacific salinity retrieval.
76. Retrieval of fine resolution land covers in high latitude region of Alaska from integrated phenological characteristics
Core Problem: Arctic vegetation types are difficult to identify at regional scale because phenology is complex and field labels are sparse.
Key Innovation: Science of Remote Sensing retrieves fine-resolution high-latitude land cover in Alaska from integrated phenological characteristics.
77. Validating remotely sensed biomass estimates with forest inventory data in the western US
Core Problem: Remote-sensing biomass estimates require rigorous validation against forest inventory data before they can support carbon accounting and management.
Key Innovation: Science of Remote Sensing validates remotely sensed biomass estimates with forest inventory data across the western United States.
78. Effects of rainwater chemistry and freeze–thaw cycles on soil solution processes
Core Problem: Rainwater chemistry and freeze-thaw cycles can change soil-solution conditions relevant to erosion, but their combined effects are poorly constrained.
Key Innovation: Catena simulates acidic, moderate, and ammonium-rich rainwater under freeze-thaw cycles to examine carbonate dissolution, particle hydration, leaching, and organic-matter mobility.
79. Linking hydrological exchange and DOM transformation in a semi-arid river: Insights from isotopic and fluorescent fingerprinting
Core Problem: Surface-water and groundwater exchange controls dissolved organic matter transformation, but quantitative links are elusive in semi-arid rivers.
Key Innovation: Catena combines water isotopes and DOM fluorescence fingerprinting to reveal wet-season exchange controls on DOM composition in the Ba River.
80. Hydroclimate variability and methane cycling during the fen-bog transition of northern peatland
Core Problem: Methane cycling during fen-bog transitions depends on hydroclimate, but compound-specific responses are difficult to reconstruct from peat records.
Key Innovation: Catena uses plant macrofossils and compound-specific lipid isotopes to reconstruct hydroclimate and methane cycling in northern peatland.
81. Isotopic insights into the fate of atmospheric nitrogen in alpine tundra ponds with contrasting land cover and cryospheric conditions
Core Problem: Atmospheric nitrogen fate in alpine tundra waters remains poorly resolved under contrasting snow, rain, and cryospheric conditions.
Key Innovation: Catena combines nitrate and water isotopes in Italian Alpine ponds to identify nitrogen pathways under different land-cover and cryosphere settings.
82. Study on the longitudinal vibration characteristics of large-diameter piles and necked piles in stratified frozen soil
Core Problem: Large-diameter and defective piles in frozen layered soils require dynamic models that account for variable impedance and stratification.
Key Innovation: Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering derives longitudinal vibration solutions for large-diameter and necked piles in stratified frozen soil.
83. In-situ investigation of excess pore water pressure response during vibratory probe compaction in saturated dredged soils
Core Problem: Vibratory probe compaction in saturated dredged soils changes excess pore pressure in ways that are not well constrained in situ.
Key Innovation: Transportation Geotechnics monitors pore-pressure response at multiple depths and distances during vibratory probe compaction.
84. The relationship between micro-fragmentation mechanisms and macro-mechanical responses in granite residual soil
Core Problem: Granitic residual soil behavior depends on particle fragmentation, but breakage mechanisms are less studied than in sands.
Key Innovation: Transportation Geotechnics links micro-fragmentation mechanisms to macroscopic mechanical response in granite residual soil.
85. Construction induced variability in deep soil mixing of problematic soils: field evidence from peat and high plasticity clays
Core Problem: Deep soil mixing performance varies strongly with construction parameters and problematic soil type, complicating quality control.
Key Innovation: Transportation Geotechnics reports field evidence from peat and high-plasticity clay sites to quantify construction-induced variability in DSM columns.
86. Multiscale DEM-FDM framework for subgrade dynamic response under high-speed railway speed-up
Core Problem: Subgrade dynamic response under high-speed railway speed-up depends on particle-scale interactions that continuum models struggle to represent.
Key Innovation: Transportation Geotechnics develops a coupled DEM-FDM vehicle-track-subgrade framework for multiscale dynamic-response analysis.
87. Numerical investigation of local scour around inclined piles under current condition
Core Problem: Inclined piles alter local flow and sediment transport, but scour patterns are not well resolved under current-driven conditions.
Key Innovation: Ocean Engineering develops a numerical model for local scour around inclined piles using RANS turbulence, bed-load, and suspended-load transport.
88. Experimental and numerical investigation of hydraulic-jetting pile penetration in sandy soils
Core Problem: Hydraulic-jet pile sinking disturbs sandy seabeds, but scour-pit geometry and penetration response depend jointly on jetting conditions and sediment properties.
Key Innovation: Ocean Engineering combines laboratory sand-scour tests and FLOW-3D simulations to quantify jetting-induced scour depth and disturbed width.