Relating self-regulation with ecosystem structure and function in Northern Peatlands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Peatlands cover 3% of the world's land area and store approximately 30% of the world's soil carbon, thus playing an important role in regional and global carbon cycling. Northern peatlands are particularly vulnerable to climate change, which has motivated research on the response of peatlands to allogenic forcing. However, less attention has been given to the self-regulating potential of peatlands. In this thesis, I describe peatlands under the conceptual framework of complex adaptive systems, wherein cross-scale feedbacks can potentially dampen or accelerate peatland response to disturbances. I hypothesized that the strength of feedbacks, and therefore the self-regulating potential of peatlands, decreases with increasing allogenic forcing. To test this hypothesis, I studied the feedbacks between ecosystem structure and function at different thaw stages in the Stordalen peatland in northern Sweden; a peatland in the discontinuous permafrost zone, where active thaw is occurring. I also collected data at the more stable and autogenic Mer Bleue peatland in eastern Canada. My results support that there are strong feedback mechanisms between structural variables (vegetation, water table and microtopography) at Mer Bleue (Chapter 3). I investigated carbon function (litter decomposition and CO2 and CH4 flux) and its link to structure at Stordalen (Chapters 4 & 5) and found that litter decomposition has weak feedbacks with structural variables along the permafrost thaw gradient (Chapter 4). To further disentangle the structure-function feedbacks, I studied 10 thaw stages and found that the dominant structural controls on CO2 and CH4 fluxes vary with progressing thaw (Chapter 5). A comparison of structural feedbacks at Mer Bleue with those at Stordalen confirmed that feedbacks are weaker in the latter more allogenically controlled site (Chapter 6).This research contributes to the bodies of literature on ecosystem self-regulation and structure-function variability in the discontinuous permafrost zone. The key contributions are as follows: 1) Deductive tests of self-regulation in peatlands are rare and my results support the hypothesis that ecosystem feedbacks are stronger in a stable peatland than in a peatland in transition. 2) My findings highlight the role of transitional stages of thaw on the carbon function of permafrost peatlands. Both contributions emphasize the importance of including self-regulating feedbacks and transitional thaw dynamics to better constrain carbon loss from thawing permafrost peatlands in a rapidly changing global carbon cycle.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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".