Effects of pulp fibre on soil physical properties and soil erosion under simulated rainfall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pulp fibre, a primary type of sludge of pulp and paper mills containing approximately 40% organic C, is usually disposed of in landfills causing a potential environmental problem. This material may be used as a soil amendment to restore the productivity of organic-matter-depleted potato-producing soils in Atlantic Canada. The effect of incorporating this material at rates equivalent to 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, and 4.0% organic matter in the plow layer of a gravelly loam soil on selected soil physical properties and soil erosion was evaluated. The objectives were to determine the effect of pulp fibre additions on selected soil properties, which are pertinent to water retention and movement and to evaluate its effectiveness in reducing runoff and soil loss, major contributing processes to soil degradation . Chemical analysis of pulp fibre revealed that all heavy metal concentrations were well below allowable concentrations for Category A compost. One year after incorporation, bulk density of the Ap horizon had decreased with increasing rates of organic matter addition. On the other hand, the saturated hydraulic conductivity and specific moisture content increased with increasing rates of treatments. Results on water-stable aggregates revealed that the organic matter in the pulp fibre combined smaller aggregates to form larger aggregates, resulting in a larger proportion of macropores as compared to micropores. In the 4% organic matter treatment, a 27% increase was found in the 1.0 to 5.0 mm-diameter aggregates whereas a 23% reduction was found in aggregates smaller than 1.0 mm diameter. In spite of the higher specific moisture content of the organic-matter-treated soils, soil moisture content measured immediately prior to the erosion test indicated that field soil moisture contents were lower than those of the control. Time of runoff initiation, rates of runoff and soil loss were greatly improved with the amendments. The beneficial effects of the 4% organic matter treatment include 2.1 times delay in runoff initiation, and 23 and 71% reduction in runoff and soil loss, respectively. Although the beneficial effects in soil and water conservation are apparent, a minor drawback appears to be lower field soil moisture content. Large-scale implementation of the addition of this material in potato fields should proceed only with caution. Key words: Saturated hydraulic conductivity, moisture retention, water stable aggregate, mean weight diameter, sediment yield, soil amendment
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".