Soil Organic Carbon Quantity and Distribution in Frost Boils in a Canadian High Arctic Polar Semi-desert Ecosystem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High Arctic soil organic carbon (SOC) stores are a key component in the global C cycle and are locally important for nutrient cycling in the polar deserts that dominate these regions. Compared to other Arctic regions, we know relatively little about the quantity and distribution of polar desert SOC. Unique frost-driven soil processes in polar deserts result in patterned ground features such as frost boils wherein, SOC-rich patches may develop via diapirism. The objective of this research was to determine whether these patches act as important nutrient sources for vascular plants and how subsurface patches of SOC associated with diapirism contribute to the polar desert carbon pool. \nI investigated SOC in 560 frost boils across two polar semi-deserts in the Canadian High Arctic using a field portable visible and near-infrared spectrophotometer. I found frequency of subsurface SOC patches was linked to broad differences in vegetation community. To determine if diapirs provide an enhanced source of plant-available nutrients we used natural abundance and enriched isotope 15N techniques to trace the flow of N through the soil-plant system. When diapir patches were available, the dominant deciduous shrub Salix arctica increased its subsurface (i.e., diapir) N uptake, often had greater % cover, and plant root biomass doubled within-diapir. Plant uptake of enriched 15N injected into C-rich soil patches was 2.5 fold greater in diapir than in non-diapir frost boils, also confirming that S. arctica is able to access N when these patches are present.\nMy best estimate of SOC stored in the active layer of High Arctic polar semi-deserts is 8.14 ± 0.45 Pg SOC, or ~73% of SOC stored in the top 30 cm of all High Arctic soils. When subsurface SOC patches were detected in frost boils, those frost boils contained nearly double the SOC compared to those without patches and on average 40% of the SOC was found within the patch. Thus, despite diapiric frost boils representing only 35% of frost boils, they contribute disproportionately to High Arctic C storage.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.005 | 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".