soil biocrust

ENVO:01000910 ·resolve ·TERRESTRIAL ·EXACT REVIEWED

A biocrust which is formed by photosynthetic microbial assemblages colonising the surface layer of a portion of arid soil. Through their successional dynamics, these communities reduce the soil surface's albedo, impart it with stability against erosion, modify its hydrology, and promote its fertility. — ENVO

Source attestations

Each upstream vocabulary's own account of this habitat. Assertion counts are per-source units and are not comparable across sources — GOLD counts organisms, BacDive strains, PREGO taxa.

What each upstream vocabulary says about this habitat
Source	Label / path	Assertions	Unit
GOLD	Environmental > Terrestrial > Soil > Biocrust 2 GOLD ecosystem node ids share this path; first shown. See data/raw/gold_ecosystem_paths.tsv.	1	ORGANISM
GOLD	Environmental > Terrestrial > Soil > Soil crust > Biological	1	ORGANISM

Broader habitats

solid astronomical body part ENVO:00000191
soil ENVO:00001998
biocrust ENVO:01000909
surface of an astronomical body ENVO:01001483
Soil crust habitatmech:GOLD.b1b5044bde

Also called

Biocrust — GOLD
Biological — GOLD
biological soil crust — ENVO
cryptobiotic soil — ENVO
cryptogamic soil — ENVO
microbiotic soil — ENVO
microphytic soil — ENVO
soil biological crust — ENVO

Curation

What a curator decided about this record, and why. A record built from several source concepts can carry one decision per concept.

GROUND 2026-08-16 · claude-opus-5
Grounded to ENVO:01000910 'soil biocrust' (EXACT). Compound-path screen (#12): every search route reads the GOLD leaf alone, but the leaf is only the last step of the path — 'Biological' under 'Soil crust' means 'biological soil crust'. Searched on its own it matches nothing (or the wrong sense entirely: 'Hyaline' finds PATO's transparent), which is why the class-level sweep recorded no match. The compound names ENVO:01000910 'soil biocrust' exactly. Read against the full path before deciding. (source concept habitatmech:GOLD.eeb3ba4bc5)
REVIEW 2026-08-16 · claude-opus-5
Reviewed and endorsed the seeder's own resolution. Risky-grounding review (#12), co-attestor pass: this source concept feeds a record whose grounding was flagged and reviewed, and the record could not reach REVIEWED until every source feeding it was decided. The GOLD path's leaf is the term's label and the path's parent steps agree with the term's sense, so the seeder's resolution is endorsed. (source concept habitatmech:GOLD.f9e01b9603)

Provenance

Generated by scripts/seed_from_sources.py from the committed inventories in data/raw/. View the record.