Diatom ecological response to deposition of the 833-850 CE White River Ash (east lobe) ashfall in a small subarctic Canadian lake
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A <5 mm thick volcanic ashfall layer associated with the White River Ash (east lobe [WRAe]) originating from the eruption of Mount Churchill, Alaska (833-850 CE; 1,117-1,100 cal BP) was observed in two freeze cores obtained from Pocket Lake (62.5090°N, -114.3719°W), a small subarctic lake located within the city limits of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. Here we analyze changes in diatom assemblages to assess impact of tephra deposition on the aquatic biota of a subarctic lake. In a well-dated core constrained by 8 radiocarbon dates, diatom counts were carried out at 1-mm intervals through an interval spanning 1 cm above and below the tephra layer with each 1 mm sub-sample represented about 2 years of deposition. Non-metric Multidimensional Scaling (NMDS) and Stratigraphically Constrained Incremental Sum of Squares (CONISS) analyses were carried out and three distinct diatom assemblages were identified throughout the interval. The lowermost "Pre-WRAe Assemblage (Pre-WRAeA)" was indicative of slightly acidic and eutrophic lacustrine conditions. Winter deposition of the tephra layer drove a subsequent diatom flora shift to the "WRAe Assemblage (WRAeA)" the following spring. The WRAeA contained elevated abundances of taxa associated with oligotrophic, nutrient depleted and slightly more alkaline lake waters. These changes were only apparent in samples within the WRAe containing interval indicating that they were short lived and only sustained for a single year of deposition. Immediately above the WRAe horizon, a third, "Post-WRAe Assemblage (Post-WRAeA)" was observed. This assemblage was initially similar to that of the Pre-WRAeA but gradually became more distinct upwards, likely due to climatic patterns independent of the WRAe event. These results suggest that lacustrine environments are sensitive to perturbations such as deposition of ash fall, but that ecological communities in subarctic systems can also have high resilience and can recover rapidly. If subsampling of the freeze cores was carried out at a more standard resolution (0.5-1 cm) these subtle diatom ecological responses to perturbation associated with the WRAe depositional event would not have been observed. This research illustrates the importance of high-resolution subsampling when studying the environmental impact of geologically "near instantaneous" events such as episodic deposition of ashfalls.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".