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Over the last decade, an increasing number of studies have used soundscapes to address diverse ecological questions. Sound represents one of the few sources of information capable of providing in situ insights into processes occurring within opaque soil matrices. To date, the use of soundscapes for soil macrofauna monitoring has been experimentally tested only in controlled laboratory environments. Here we assess the validity of laboratory predictions and explore the use of soil soundscape proxies for monitoring soil macrofauna (i.e., earthworm) activities in an outdoor context. In a common garden experiment in northern Sweden, we constructed outdoor mesocosm plots (N = 36) containing two different Arctic vegetation types (meadow and heath) and introduced earthworms to half of these plots. Earthworms substantially altered the ambient soil soundscape under both vegetation types, as measured by both traditional soundscape indices and frequency band power levels, although their acoustic impacts were expressed differently in heath versus meadow soils. While these findings support the as-of-yet untapped promise of using belowground soundscape analyses to monitor soil ecosystem health, direct acoustic emissions from earthworm activities appear to be an unlikely proxy for tracking worm activities at daily timescales. Instead, earthworms indirectly altered the soil soundscape by ‘re-engineering’ the soil matrix: an effect that was dependent on vegetation type. Our findings suggest that long-term (i.e., seasonal) earthworm activities in natural soil settings can likely be monitored indirectly via their impacts on soundscape measures and acoustic indices. Analyzing soil soundscapes may enable larger-scale monitoring of high-latitude soils and is directly applicable to the specific case of earthworm invasions within Arctic soils, which has recently been identified as a potential threat to the resilience of high-latitude ecosystems. Soil soundscapes could also offer a novel mea

Interactions between organic carbon (OC) and minerals represent a critical mechanism for stabilizing organic matter in soils. Because both mineral weathering and plant productivity are negatively affected by soil erosion, mineral-associated organic carbon (MOC) chemistry is also expected to vary with erosion intensity. Here we show that MOC chemistry, determined by carbon X-ray absorption near-edge fine structure spectroscopy (XANES), exhibits little difference across a large (10-fold) gradient in erosion-derived soil turnover times. Mineral-associated OC chemistry further fails to explain the variation in radiocarbon-based MOC turnover times. Our results suggest that soil OC longevity is largely independent of organic matter chemistry in steep mountainous landscapes where soil development is constrained by erosion.

The empirical quantification of rates of material movement in cryoturbated soils has lagged behind the physical and chemical characterisation of these materials. We applied a novel suite of elemental (C, Hg), stable isotope (C-13) and radioisotope (Cs-137, Pb-210, C-14, Be-10) tracers in conjunction with analytical and numerical models to constrain the rates and patterns of soil movement due to cryoturbation in a non-sorted circle (NSC) near Abisko, Sweden. We present the first observations of the variability of Be-10 across a patterned-ground feature, which facilitate the interpretation of subsurface peaks in soil organic carbon, Hg and C-13 and provide constraints on the surficial histories of cryoturbated materials. Apparent rates of surficial lateral movement across the NSC estimated from Cs-137 and Pb-210 (0-2.55cm year(-1)) decreased with distance from its centre and were an order of magnitude greater than rates of subduction and subsurface movement estimated from C-14 (0.04-0.27cm year(-1)). Novel estimates of the original surficial residence times of cryoturbated parcels based on excess Be-10 and Hg inventories ranged from 238 to 3940years. Our results demonstrate the utility of the spatially explicit application of elemental and radioisotopic tracer suites to constrain cryoturbation rates in Arctic patterned ground.