--- name: brycewang-stanford/global-biogeochemical-cycles source: https://app.decimal.ai/s/brycewang-stanford-global-biogeochemical-cycles@1/SKILL.md source_sha256: d09e6a75e6e1 --- # Global Biogeochemical Cycles (global-biogeochemical-cycles) ## Journal positioning Global Biogeochemical Cycles (GBC) is the American Geophysical Union's journal for the **cycling of carbon, nutrients, and elements through the earth system**: the fluxes, budgets, and feedbacks that move and transform elements across land, ocean, and atmosphere, constrained by observations, experiments, and models. The defining expectation is a **quantitative, system-scale advance in biogeochemistry** — a better-constrained flux or budget, a newly characterized feedback, or a mechanism operating at regional-to-global scale — not a site-level process measurement of interest mainly to one community. A descriptive local incubation, a single-station time series, or an ecological/soil study with no implication for an element budget or earth-system feedback is a weak fit. This skill is a **fit / venue-selection / re-framing** tool. It does not replace the journal's current author guidance. Before submitting, re-check the live GBC / AGU author instructions and data policy. ## When to trigger - The author names GBC and wants a fit/framing check for a biogeochemical-cycling, flux/budget, or feedback paper. - A local flux measurement or experiment must be re-framed into a system-scale budget, feedback, or generalizable biogeochemical mechanism. - The author is choosing between GBC, `soil-biology-and-biochemistry` (soil-process mechanism), and `water-resources-research` (water science). - The author needs GBC's quantitative system-scale bar and AGU FAIR data-deposition expectations. ## Scope & topic fit - Carbon cycle: land and ocean carbon uptake, storage, and exchange; atmospheric CO2/CH4 budgets and their drivers. - Nutrient and element cycles: nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, silicon, sulfur, and trace elements, and their coupling to carbon. - Land–atmosphere and ocean–atmosphere biogeochemical exchange, including greenhouse-gas and reactive-gas fluxes. - Marine biogeochemistry: productivity, export, remineralization, and ocean biogeochemical–physical coupling. - Terrestrial biogeochemistry: soils, vegetation, wetlands, and disturbance effects on element budgets at landscape-to-global scale. - Biogeochemical feedbacks with climate and the human perturbation of global element cycles, from data and earth-system/biogeochemical models. ## Method & evidence bar - The contribution must be **quantitative and system-scale**: a flux, budget, or feedback that generalizes beyond one site or sample. - Budgets and fluxes require explicit uncertainty, closure assessment where applicable, and reconciliation of bottom-up and top-down constraints when both exist. - Models must be evaluated against observations with skill metrics and benchmarks; parameter and structural uncertainty should be addressed, not ignored. - Observational and experimental work needs defensible scaling from measurement to system level, with error propagation through the scaling. - Mechanistic and feedback claims need evidence linking the proposed process to the budget or signal, not correlation alone. - Data and code underpinning fluxes, budgets, and model results should be deposited in a FAIR community repository with a DOI per AGU policy. ## Structure & house style - AGU article format; GBC publishes research articles and commentaries — re-check current article types and length expectations on the live guide. - The introduction must state the biogeochemical-cycling gap and the system-scale contribution, not just describe a site or dataset. - A key-points summary is part of the AGU format; figures should be quantitative and load-bearing (flux/budget diagrams, maps with uncertainty, model–data comparisons). - Methods and a data/software-availability statement must let a reader reproduce the central budget or flux estimate; AGU expects open data/code with persistent identifiers. - Reported quantities should use established biogeochemical units and conventions so budgets are comparable across studies. ## Official-submission checklist - Before giving submission-ready advice, read `../../resources/source-basis.md` and `../../resources/official-source-map.md`; start from the AGU anchors, then cite the current GBC page you checked. - Search the live site for "Global Biogeochemical Cycles author guidelines" and follow the current AGU/Wiley version. - Re-check article types, key-points and abstract format, and length/figure expectations. - Confirm the **AGU data and software availability policy**: deposit data/code in an approved FAIR repository and cite it with a DOI. - Re-check competing-interests, funding, author-contribution, and AI-use disclosure, and open-access terms. - If the live official instructions conflict with this skill, the official instructions win. ## Pre-submission self-check - [ ] The contribution is a system-scale flux/budget/feedback, not a single-site measurement. - [ ] Budgets and fluxes report explicit uncertainty and closure/reconciliation where applicable. - [ ] Models are benchmarked against observations with skill metrics and uncertainty treatment. - [ ] Scaling from measurement to system level propagates error defensibly. - [ ] Mechanistic/feedback claims are linked to the budget by evidence, not correlation alone. - [ ] Data and code are deposited in a FAIR repository with persistent identifiers. ## Common desk-reject triggers - A site-level flux measurement or incubation with no system-scale budget or feedback implication. - Budgets or fluxes reported without uncertainty, closure, or top-down/bottom-up reconciliation. - Model results presented without observational benchmarking or any uncertainty treatment. - Scaling claims that ignore error propagation from measurement to global estimate. - Missing or non-compliant data/code deposition where AGU policy requires it. - Scope mismatch: a soil-microbial mechanism paper or an ecology paper with no element-cycle payoff. ## Re-routing decision - Soil-process mechanism (microbial, enzymatic, organic-matter) is the core → `soil-biology-and-biochemistry`. - Water-cycle or water-resources science dominant → `water-resources-research` / `journal-of-hydrology`. - Ecosystem/global-change biology framing dominant → `global-change-biology`. - Climate-dynamics or carbon–climate budget framing dominant → `journal-of-climate`. - A documented biogeochemical dataset is the product rather than the interpretation → `earth-system-science-data`. ## Output format ```text [Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason) [Target] Global Biogeochemical Cycles [Topic tags] <2–3 closest biogeochemical-cycling topics> [System-scale contribution] [Method/evidence] [Top risk] [Official items to re-check]
[Re-route suggestion] ```