Native Aspen Carbon Cache: Exploring Soil Carbon Under Native Vegetation in the Black Soil Zone of Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of Canada’s agricultural carbon market requires an understanding of each piece of land’s agricultural carbon footprint, including carbon sources and sinks. Nature-based carbon sequestration is one carbon sink method that can help achieve net-zero agriculture. Soils store about two-thirds of an ecosystem’s carbon, making the soil in a nature-based solution critical. Naturally occurring, native, woody vegetative areas are scattered across the Canadian Prairies. These areas often form in and around trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides) copses and are diverse vegetative communities of tree, shrub, grass, and forb species. This thesis studies 142 sampling locations within six different copses and 24 transects across the Black soil zone of Saskatchewan. At each sample location, leaf, fibric, humic (LFH) layer, and soil samples up to 60 cm were collected and divided by horizon. Samples were analyzed for total, organic, and inorganic carbon composition and storage. The first paper in this thesis analyzes the soil carbon along transects into the adjacent agricultural fields. This study highlighted a carbon gradient extending from the native copse. On average, the copse stored 111% more total carbon than surrounding agricultural fields. The LFH and A-horizon were the most important contributors to the differences observed. The second paper in this thesis analyzes the soil carbon within the native copses and presents the first known carbon densities. There were no significant carbon density differences observed across the six copses. These areas can be simplified for modelling to a single carbon density value of 29.90 kg TC m-2. A total of 396 Tg C is stored under all native copses of Saskatchewan’s Black soil zone. The copse edge also stored significant amounts of carbon, with a density of 21.56 kg TC m-2. The results of this thesis highlight the importance of continued research into these native copses as they hold a significant amount of carbon, which is crucial for an accurate carbon budget in Canadian agriculture. This will help landowners and policy makers alike in understanding the carbon benefits of these native copses, and may lead to the inclusion of these areas in Canada’s carbon market.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".