Organic Matter Composition as a Driver of Soil Bacterial Responses to Pig Carcass Decomposition in a Canadian Continental Climate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Organic by‐products are released into the surrounding soil during the terrestrial decomposition of animal remains. The affected area, known as the Cadaver Decomposition Island (CDI), can undergo biochemical changes that contribute to landscape heterogeneity. Soil bacteria are highly sensitive to labile inputs, but it is unknown how they respond to shifts in dissolved organic matter (DOM) quantity and quality resulting from animal decomposition. We aimed to evaluate the relationship between soil DOM composition and bacterial activity/function in CDIs under a Canadian temperate continental climate. This was studied in soils surrounding adult pig carcasses ( n = 3) that were surface deposited within a mixed forested environment (Trois‐Rivières, Québec) in June 2019. Using fluorescence spectroscopy and dissolved organic carbon analyses, we detected a pulse of labile protein‐like DOM during the summer season (day 55). This was found to be an important driver of heightened soil bacterial respiration, cell abundance and potential carbohydrate metabolism. These bacterial disturbances persisted into the cooler autumn season (day 156) and led to the gradual transformation of labile DOM inputs into microbially sourced humic‐like compounds. By the spring (day 324), DOM quantities and bacterial measures almost recovered, but DOM quality remained distinct from surrounding vegetal humic signals. All observed effects were spatially constrained to the topsoil (A‐horizon) and within 20 cm laterally from the carcasses. These findings provide valuable insight into CDI organic matter cycling within a cold‐climate ecosystem. Repeated CDI studies will however be required to capture the changing dynamics resulting from increasing global temperatures.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".