Mapping of Permafrost Landforms and Soils of Coastal Catchments Along the Yukon Coast, Northwest Canada
Abstract
Climate change in arctic permafrost regions leads to alterations in biochemistry, a redistribution of soil organic carbon (SOC), contaminants, sediment and other nutrients. Arctic permafrost coasts make up 34 % of the Earth's coastlines. Along the Yukon coast near Herschel Island, 80 % of the landforms are erosional landforms. Climate change induced temperature alterations lead to thermal erosion of ice-rich cliffs and high retreating rates. Recent studies show erosion rates of up to 25 m yr-1 at specific locations. In the context with coastal erosion, a release into the ocean is likely. Whereas terrestrial permafrost is widely investigated, the aim of the EU project Nunataryuk is to improve knowledge in the context of land ocean interactions of these vulnerable coastal environments. Environmental changes such as rising sea level and longer and warmer thawing seasons necessitate investigations on processes and interconnections of parameters of arctic coastal systems.
The aim of the PhD project is to investigate soil parameters such as soil organic carbon, nitrogen, bulk density, nutrients, contaminants and further potential thaw impacts of terrestrial permafrost soils in small coastal catchments on the Canadian Beaufort coast. One task is to create landcover and geomorphological maps using different types of high-resolution remote sensing data. These will be further used to apply digital soil mapping methods to model the spatial distribution of different soil parameters. Previous work has shown that the application of machine learning methods, e.g. Random Forest, can gain promising results. Therefore, machine learning methods of digital soil mapping will be used to improve the understanding of Arctic soils in the context of climate change, the influence of environmental variables and to create data sets supporting local to regional applications of permafrost models.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.B31E2483W
- Keywords:
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- 0428 Carbon cycling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0475 Permafrost;
- cryosphere;
- and high-latitude processes;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0702 Permafrost;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 1615 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGE