Native plant species screening for phytogeochemical exploration in the Zambian Copperbelt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Trace element analysis of plant tissues can aid mineral exploration for sediment hosted Cu-Co deposits in the Zambian Copperbelt (ZCB). This study was conducted at the Mitumba prospect, an area in the ZCB known to have copper minerals but no historical mining activities, to identify native plant species and their tissues that are most indicative of mineralized zones. Field inventory and ecological analysis identified 22 native plant species from 12 different families, of which Fabaceae (36.4%) was dominant. At species level and based on the coating index, we identified several predominant species, among them, Haumaniastrum katangense (Lamiaceae), Aframomum angustifolium (Zingiberaceae), Brachystegia boehmii (Fabaceae), and Diplorynchus condilocarpon (Apocynaceae). Sampling was undertaken of soils and plant organs above the known mineralized zone and at control points outside of the mineralized area. Most species translocated Cu from the roots to the aboveground biomass as indicated by translocation factors (TF) > 1 but only three species, namely, Haumaniastrum katangense , Aframomum angustifolium and Diplorynchus condilocarpon can both translocate and bioconcentrate (BCF > 1) bioavailable Cu from the rhizosphere, making them ideal candidates for phytogeochemical exploration. Only Haumaniastrum katangense and Aframomum angustifolium accumulated Co. Plant roots and leaves demonstrate significant Cu anomalism and show a wider population of anomalous values compared to the soils. Statistical and machine learning techniques both indicate significant relationships between soil Cu concentration and the content of Cu in plant roots and leaves highlighting soil pH, organic matter and clay content as the major physicochemical variables influencing metal bioavailability in soil-plant systems. • Trace element analysis of plant tissues can aid locating orebodies. • Haumaniastrum katangense, Aframomum angustifolium and Diploryhncus condilocarpon are copper indicators. • Haumanastrum katangense and Aframomum angustifolium also accumulate cobalt. • Machine learning algorithms effectively elucidate soil-plant relationships. • Soil pH, organic matter and clay content influences metal bioavailability.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".