The role of catchment characteristics, discharge, and active layer thaw on seasonal stream chemistry across ten permafrost catchments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. High latitude catchments are rapidly warming, leading to altered precipitation regimes, widespread permafrost degradation and observed shifts in stream chemistry for major arctic rivers. At headwater scales, stream discharge and chemistry are seasonally variable, and the relative influence of catchment characteristics, climate and active layer thaw on this seasonality has been poorly addressed. To provide new insight into mechanisms driving changes in streamflow chemistry within permafrost watersheds, we measured discharge and sampled major ion and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations across ten permafrost catchments in Yukon Territory, Canada. We incorporated concentration-discharge relationships within generalized additive models to resolve the distinct influence of discharge and seasonal active layer thaw on stream chemistry and identify the role of watershed characteristics on the magnitude and seasonality of solute concentrations. After accounting for seasonal variations in discharge, results indicate both major ions and DOC were highly seasonal across all catchments, with DOC declining and major ion concentration increasing post freshet. Seasonal variability in major ion concentrations were primarily driven by active layer thaw, whereas DOC seasonality was strongly controlled by flushing of soil organic carbon during freshet. While major ion concentrations were geologically mediated, greater permafrost extent led to enhanced seasonality in major ion concentrations. Catchments with strong topographical gradients and thinner organic soils had higher specific discharge, lower DOC concentrations but greater relative seasonality. Our results highlight the important role catchment characteristics play on shaping both the seasonal variations and magnitude of solute concentrations in permafrost underlain watersheds.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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 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".