◈ The Soil Life Atlas

◆ fingerprint

How the atlas decodes mixed soil.

MS² features that let us tell one phylum apart from another — collectively, the fingerprint that turns a community of spectra into phylum percentages.

Each biomarker below contributes to Bray–Curtis dissimilarity between phyla. We publish the top contributors per phylum; a full sample is decomposed by projecting its spectrum onto this basis. The current implementation is SIMPER v1 — swappable with a spectral foundation model (L1 Identity) when that layer ships.

method · SIMPER v1 | 25 phyla · 11 with fingerprint features

◈ proof

analysis-19 ·
iter3a · floor 0.20
IS + RIE correction

ClimGrass soil, decomposed.

Projecting a 12-sample long-term warming × drought experiment onto the fingerprint, averaged across samples — mean phylum composition rolled up to kingdom. These are the numbers the manuscript carries.

Fungi

48.2%

Plantae

34.9%

Animalia

8.1%

Bacteria

7.6%

Protists

1.2%

Archaea

0.0%

The analysis-19 IS + RIE + ArchLips + floor=0.20 configuration lifts Bray-Curtis plausibility from 0.341 → 0.131 — a 62% improvement over raw quantification. Published treatment effects are preserved.

◆ per-phylum fingerprints

top 5 contributors shown per phylum

Fungi

· 2 phyla

Plantae

· 1 phylum

method note ·
fingerprint scores are SIMPER contributions to Bray–Curtis dissimilarity (Clarke 1993), normalized per-biomarker to 0–1 for display. Phylum resolution is the publication scale; kingdom-level is a sum aggregate. The data contract is method-agnostic — when the spectral foundation model (L1) ships, the same table gains a second row per biomarker with method=foundation_v1 and the UI exposes a toggle.