Normative Mineralogy of 1170 Soil Profiles across Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Weathering of soil minerals provides base cations that buffer against acidity, and nutrients that support plant growth. In general, direct observations of soil minerals are rare; however, their abundance can be determined indirectly through soil geochemistry using normative-calculation procedures. This study compiled a data set of major oxide content from published and archived soil geochemical observations for 1170 sites across Canada (averaged over the soil profile [A, B, and C horizons], weighted by depth and bulk density to a maximum depth of 50 cm). Quantitative soil mineralogy (wt%) was systematically determined at each site using the normative method, ‘Analysis to Mineralogy’ (A2M); the efficacy of the approach was evaluated by comparison to X-ray Diffraction (XRD) mineralogy available for a subset of the study sites. At these sites, predicted A2M mineralogy was significantly related to estimated XRD, showing a strong linear relationship for plagioclase, quartz, and K-feldspar, and a moderate linear relationship for chlorite and muscovite. Further, the predicted A2M plagioclase content was almost identical to the estimated XRD soil mineralogy, showing no statistical difference. The Canada-wide predicted quantitative soil mineralogy was consistent with the underlying bedrock geology, such as in north-western Saskatchewan and north-eastern Alberta, which had high amounts of quartz due to the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. Other soil minerals (plagioclase, potassium feldspar, chlorite, and muscovite) varied greatly in response to changing bedrock geology across Canada. Normative approaches, such as A2M, provide a reliable approach for national-scale determination of quantitative soil mineralogy, which is essential for the assessment of soil weathering rates.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".