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Relationships between base saturation, effective base saturation and soil pH as the references for the development and verification of criteria for international soil classification

2025· article· en· W4412814340 on OpenAlex
Cezary Kabała, S. Mantel, Magdalena Bednik, Melania Matuszak

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueGeoderma · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicHeavy metals in environment
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersUniwersytet Przyrodniczy we WroclawiuMinisterstwo Edukacji i NaukiUniwersytet Przyrodniczy we Wrocławiu
KeywordsSaturation (graph theory)Base (topology)Soil scienceEnvironmental scienceEnvironmental chemistryChemistryMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Base saturation (BS) and effective base saturation (BSe) are widely used soil characteristics, commonly involved in the criteria of soil classification, including the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) system. However, their parallel use can result in an internal inconsistency in assessing the base status in particular soil types. Furthermore, numerous methods of estimating BS and BSe lead to an incomparability of analytical results and improper soil classification; therefore, replacement of Bs and BSe with simple pH measurement is postulated. The aim of the present study was (i) to analyse the relationship between BS and BSe and the consequences of replacing BS with BSe in selected classification criteria of the WRB system, and (ii) to analyse the relationships between pH and BS and BSe, and the possibility of replacing these measures with pH for at least provisional soil classification. An analysis was carried out using a large database (more than 290,000 soil horizons) compiled from the datasets from the USA, Canada, Portugal, Poland, ISRIC, and other published papers, which comprises soil representing various climate zones, parent materials, and soil types. In mineral soils, 50% BS corresponds to 75–77% (in Andosols: 85%) BSe, therefore, BS and BSe cannot be equivalently replaced in the requirements for Dystric and Eutric qualifiers. Setting the criteria at 50% BSe in the latter editions of WRB results in a possible overestimation of the abundance of soils with Eutric qualifier compared to estimations based on the criteria of the FAO Legend to World Soil Map and early editions of WRB. The study confirmed the statistically significant relationship between BS and pH and estimated the pH w values corresponding to 50% BS and 50% BSe at 5.2 and 4.7, respectively, in mineral soils. The large variation of these relationships justifies separate thresholds for organic soils and Andosols (at pH w 4.9 and 6.1, respectively) and the differentiation of pH thresholds for the remaining mineral soil in relation to soil organic carbon and clay content. The pH KCl values corresponding to 50% BS and 50% BSe were estimated with lower determination coefficients than for pH w . Thus, setting the thresholds on pH KCl values seems less reliable and more difficult as an in-field procedure compared to pH w .

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.792
Threshold uncertainty score0.398

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.050
GPT teacher head0.302
Teacher spread0.252 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it