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

[Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason)
[Target] Global Biogeochemical Cycles
[Topic tags] <2–3 closest biogeochemical-cycling topics>
[System-scale contribution] <the flux/budget/feedback advance beyond one site>
[Method/evidence] <do uncertainty + scaling + model/data evaluation + deposition clear GBC's bar?>
[Top risk] <the single most likely reason for rejection>
[Official items to re-check] <article type / key points / AGU data-software policy / disclosures>
[Re-route suggestion] <if not a fit, a better-matched venue>