Mercury in soil horizons from southwestern Nova Scotia: relationships with vegetative bioindicators and mineralogy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mercury (Hg) is a highly toxic mobile element which has organometallic forms (e.g. methyl mercury - MeHg) which bioaccumulate and biomagnify in food webs. Southwestern Nova Scotia is a known hotspot for Hg bioaccumulation. There is extensive research on mercury in birds, fish, invertebrates, and water; however, there is less data on Hg in soils and plants. This study examines total mercury (THg) and mineralogy of soils as well as previously obtained THg in lichens. Samples were taken from 16 sites along a transect through southwestern Nova Scotia to examine relationships between THg in soils, soil mineralogy, and THg in lichens. Soil samples from the O, A, B, and E (if present) horizons were dried, sieved to a silt/clay fraction and analyzed for THg and loss on ignition (LOI) using thermal pyrolysis atomic absorption spectroscopy. Soil mineralogy of the A, B, and E horizons from seven sites with different bedrock were analyzed using scanning electron microscopy. The soil THg data was examined using statistical analyses to test for significant differences between horizons and for correlations with soil mineralogy, and lichen THg. Preliminary results show that THg in soil ranges between 2.2 ppb and 323.9 ppb and appeared to be broadly correlative with THg in lichen. This work will help to clarify the relationship between soil mineralogy and THg soil and lichen, and relationships with bioindicators in SW Nova Scotia.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.006 |
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".