Establishing a community garden in Miawpukek First Nation, Newfoundland, Canada: Research brief on soil contamination challenges and solutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by declining food security, particularly in isolated communities like Miawpukek First Nation (MFN), Newfoundland, where geographic isolation limits food access. MFN is only one example of many rural Indigenous communities attempting to establish sustainable local food systems to improve food security. This study aimed to develop safe community garden sites at MFN while addressing potential soil contamination. Soil testing at proposed garden sites revealed inorganic arsenic (As) as the only contaminant of concern, with levels exceeding Canadian agricultural guidelines. To address this, Hügelkultur-style raised beds with imported soil were used. Potatoes grown in these beds had undetectable As levels, making them safe per Health Canada (HC) standards, whereas potatoes grown in the contaminated soil exceeded HC’s lower As guideline limit. Peeling these potatoes removed detectable As, leaving the flesh safe to consume, while the skins contained levels above HC recommendations. Kale grown in both raised beds and native soil remained within safety limits, suggesting certain crops may be less prone to contamination. These findings stress the importance of soil testing prior to establishing community gardens, especially in rural and remote areas. Food security ensures safe food access for all, but for Indigenous communities, it also fosters food sovereignty and resilience.
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 | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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".