Macquarie Island Springtail Response to Diesel Contamination in Field Soils

Data from Thomas Mooney's PhD research describes the response of springtails to diesel fuel in soils on Macquarie Island. The dataset includes species counts, soil physicochemical properties, and vegetation cover from a field experiment conducted over the 2008/09 and 2009/10 seasons. This work was funded by Australian Antarctic Science projects and supervised by researchers from the Australian Antarctic Division and the University of New England.

Use Cases

• Modeling dose-response relationships for springtails based on six spiked diesel concentrations per plot.
• Analyzing correlations between soil physicochemical properties and invertebrate survival after contamination.
• Assessing the impact of soil carbon gradients (sandy to peaty) on contaminant toxicity.
• Comparing invertebrate community responses to diesel fuel across different vegetation cover types.

Strengths

• Experimental design includes a controlled field study with 10 plots per site and seven soil core pairs per plot.
• Data covers multiple measured domains: fuel concentration, species counts, soil properties, and vegetation cover.
• Research is linked to a peer-reviewed PhD thesis and a sister dataset for mite taxa, providing context.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last updated 2010-04-01 23:59:59.999000; freshness should be verified.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Australian Antarctic Data Centre (AU_AADC)

Collection Method

Field experiment involving soil core sampling, diesel spiking, and incubation under field-realistic conditions for 15 days.

Time Range

2008/09 and 2009/10 field seasons

Freshness

Last updated 2010-04-01 23:59:59.999000.

Geography

Macquarie Island, specifically three sites near the research station