Recovery of smelter-impacted peatlands (Sudbury, Ontario): botanical and microbial community perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over one century of mineral smelting activities in the Sudbury Basin denuded the \nregional landscape of vegetation near Sudbury, Ontario, previously (early 1960s) the once the \nworld’s largest point source of SO2 and particulate Ni and Cu emissions. In 1986, fourteen years \nafter the start of major local pollution controls, Gignac and Beckett reported that poor fen \npeatlands neighboring a Sudbury smelter contained flat, black, and barren peat, depicting severe \npollutant stresses. I investigated the plant and microbial communities, and interrelated \ngeochemical controls, in these severely smelter-damaged poor fens. Over the past 35 years \nSphagnum moss, a keystone peatland genus, has re-established in poor fens as close as 4 km to \nsmelters, whereas in 1986, Sphagnum was not observed until 12 km. Chemical analysis of the \npeat showed that total Ni and Cu concentrations in peat samples were lower than in 1986, and \ndecreased with increasing distance from the smelter. As peatlands are globally important carbon \nsinks, with microbial communities mediating peatland C-cycling, I determined how smelter \nactivity has altered peat moss and soil microbiomes. I showed that microbial community \nstructure was controlled by plant species and microtopography in endophytic Sphagnum \ncommunities but was primarily influenced by metal contamination and pH in peat. After healthy \nSphagnum and peat plugs were placed into a contaminated peatland. Sphagnum fuscum (a \nhummock species) and Sphagnum fallax (a lawn species) showed signs of successful \nestablishment (expansion and new growth) after two years, suggesting that more efforts should \nbe made to restore Sudbury’s peatlands. The transplant peat microbiome shifted towards a \ncommunity structure mirroring the microbiome of the host peatland illustrating the central role of \nthis genus as an ecosystem engineer. I conclude my thesis discussion that because Sudbury \npeatlands show signs of slow natural recovery and considering the results from the Sphagnum \ntransplant study, that pollutant legacies are abating to the point that large-scale active restoration \nefforts can now begin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".