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While at the Ministry of Forests, Dr. Paul Sanborn carried out two retrospective studies which examined soil chemical properties at long-term silvicultural research sites where different vegetation types had been created, either as planned or unplanned experiments. These studies were Experimental Project (EP) 660 and a research project at the Archie Creek site.

In the mid-1990s, Dr. Paul Sanborn worked with Dr. Lito Arocena of UNBC to assemble and interpret basic physical, chemical, and mineralogical data for typical soils at important long-term forestry research sites in central and northeastern BC. The key results were published as:

J.M. Arocena and P. Sanborn. 1999. Mineralogy and genesis of selected soils and their implications for forest management in central and northeastern British Columbia. Canadian Journal of Soil Science 79: 571-592. https://doi.org/10.4141/S98-07

Nine pedons were involved, with 7 located at the sites of 4 Ministry of Forests Experimental Projects (E.P.), and 2 at the Aleza Lake Research Forest.

The eastern flank of the Mackenzie Mountains has a complex history of multiple glaciations by both the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets, recorded in thick sequences of glacial sediments that were documented at 3 locations (Katherine Creek, Little Bear River, Inlin Brook) by:
Duk-Rodkin, A., R.W. Barendregt, C. Tarnocai, and F.M. Phillips. 1996. Late Tertiary to late Quaternary record in the Mackenzie Mountains, Northwest Territories, Canada: stratigraphy, paleosols, paleomagnetism, and chlorine-36. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 33 (6): 875-895. https://doi.org/10.1139/e96-066

Of the 3 sites, the exposure on Inlin Brook, a tributary of the Keele River, was the least well-documented, so in summer 2004 Dr. Paul Sanborn joined a field party of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) based at Tulita, NWT, and was given helicopter support to visit Inlin Brook (August 5-8). A brief visit was also made to the Little Bear River site.

On August 9-10, Sanborn joined Alejandra Duk-Rodkin (GSC) and Rene Barendregt (U Lethbridge) in helicopter-assisted field work at sites in the Franklin Mountains and elsewhere east of the Mackenzie River.

As part of a multidisciplinary team led by Grant Zazula (then a Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University; later a palaeontologist with the Government of Yukon) and Duane Froese (Professor, University of Alberta), Dr. Paul Sanborn examined a set of buried paleosols (fossil soils) preserved in frozen sediments exposed by placer mining in the spring of 2004.

The findings were published in:
Zazula, G.D., D.G. Froese, S.A. Elias, S. Kuzmina, C. La Farge, A.V. Reyes, P.T. Sanborn, C.E. Schweger, C.A.S. Smith, and R.W. Mathewes. 2006. Vegetation buried under Dawson tephra (25,300 14C yr BP) and locally diverse late Pleistocene paleoenvironments of Goldbottom Creek, Yukon, Canada. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 242: 253–286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2006.06.005

A comparative study of grassland soils at 3 sites in northwestern BC and southern Yukon was published as:
Sanborn, P. 2010. Topographically controlled grassland soils in the Boreal Cordillera ecozone, northwestern Canada. Canadian Journal of Soil Science 90: 89-101. https://doi.org/10.4141/CJSS09048

This grew out of a field trip with Ministry of Forests range personnel to the Stikine and Tuya River valleys, near Telegraph Creek BC on August 27-28, 2007. (Two pedons were sampled in 2007, BC07-03 and BC07-04, but those results were not included in the paper.)

In August 2008, Dr. Paul Sanborn returned to the Stikine to sample pedon BC08-06, after field work in Yukon which collected the other two pedons used in the paper, from near Carmacks (Y08-39) and Kluane Lake (Y08-41). (An additional pedon from Kluane, Y08-43, was sampled and analyzed, but it was from a forested site and was not included in the paper.)

With the assistance of the Yukon Geological Survey, Dr. Paul Sanborn was able to visit the terminus of the Klutlan Glacier, a major outlet glacier which originates in the Alaska portion of the St. Elias Mountains. The stagnant terminus has a thick cover of debris, including a large component of White River tephra, providing enough soil material to support a boreal forest. Field work occurred on July 8, 2007, and results were published as:

Sanborn, P. 2010. Soil formation on supraglacial tephra deposits, Klutlan Glacier, Yukon Territory. Canadian Journal of Soil Science 90: 611-618. https://doi.org/10.4141/cjss10042

During the 1980s, Agriculture Canada pedologists Scott Smith (retired from Summerland Research Station, formerly based in Whitehorse) and Charles Tarnocai (retired from Central Experimental Farm, Ottawa) had a large field program which addressed the trends in soil development in the central Yukon. Across this region, particularly between Whitehorse and Dawson City, the land surfaces and surficial deposits vary greatly in age due to the differing extents of glaciations over the past ~2 million years.

This work built on a pioneering study from the previous decade:
Foscolos, A.E., N.W. Rutter, and O.L. Hughes. 1977. The use of pedological studies in interpreting the Quaternary history of central Yukon Territory. Bulletin 271. Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa. 48 p. https://doi.org/10.4095/103066

Tarnocai and Smith presented their results in two publications:
C. A. S. Smith, C. Tarnocai, and O. L. Hughes. 1986. Pedological investigations of Pleistocene glacial drift surfaces in the central Yukon. Géographie physique et Quaternaire, 40 (1): 29–37. https://doi.org/10.7202/032620ar
Tarnocai, C. and C. A. S. Smith. 1989. Micromorphology and development of some central Yukon paleosols, Canada. Geoderma 45 (2): 145-162. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-7061(89)90047-5

Tarnocai and Smith shared the unpublished data and soil samples from this work with Dr. Paul Sanborn, and this resulted in a student project published as:
Daviel, E., P. Sanborn, C. Tarnocai, and C.A.A. Smith. 2011.Clay mineralogy and chemical properties of argillic horizons in central Yukon paleosols. Canadian Journal of Soil Science 91: 83-93. https://doi.org/10.4141/cjss10067

Forest soil sulphur research was a continuing interest for Dr. Paul Sanborn for more than 30 years, beginning at UBC in the mid-1980s when he took a graduate course in Forest Soils from Dr. Tim Ballard. Among the things that he learned was that soils in much of BC were deficient in sulphur (S). Simultaneously, he became aware of the large amount of research on prescribed fire in BC forests, with broadcast burning being the main method of site preparation across much of the province at that time.

Sanborn undertook various projects in this area of research:

1. UBC Postdoctoral Project on effects of prescribed fire on sulphur in forest soils (1988-90)
2. Cluculz retrospective study (E.P. 886.10) with the BC Ministry of Forests and UNBC
3. Sulphur stable isotope tracer study (E.P. 886.15) with the BC Ministry of Forests and UNBC

The Kluane Lake area of SW Yukon was a continuing focus of Dr. Paul Sanborn's research for more than a decade, and generated several productive collaborations. Key themes included biological soil crusts in boreal grasslands, and interactions between aeolian sediment deposition, slope processes, and fire in boreal grassland and forest soils.

Research results appeared in these publications:
Marsh, J., Nouvet, S., Sanborn, P., and Coxson, D. 2006. Composition and function of biological soil crust communities along topographic gradients in grasslands of central interior British Columbia (Chilcotin) and southwestern Yukon (Kluane). Canadian Journal of Botany 84: 717-736. https://doi.org/10.1139/b06-026

Pautler, B.G., Reichart, G.-J., Sanborn, P.T., Simpson, M.J., and Weijers, J.W.H. 2014. Comparison of soil derived tetraether membrane lipid distributions and plant-wax δD compositions for reconstruction of Canadian Arctic temperatures. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 404: 78-88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2014.03.038

Sanborn, P. and A.J.T. Jull. 2010. Loess, bioturbation, fire, and pedogenesis in a boreal forest – grassland mosaic, Yukon Territory, Canada. 19th World Congress of Soil Science, Soil Solutions for a Changing World 1 – 6 August 2010, Brisbane, Australia. http://www.iuss.org/19th%20WCSS/Symposium/pdf/0120.pdf

The 2003 field work with Darwyn Coxson was a pilot study to assess the types and distribution of biological soil crusts in boreal grasslands in the Kluane Lake area. Eight sites were visited at which the team sampled the crust and the uppermost A horizon immediately underneath it. Note that site numbers Y03-03, -04, -05, -06, -07, -09, -10 and -12 were indicated as sites 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 and 12 in Table 1 of Marsh et al. (2006). Additional crust sampling was conducted at two additional sites (“Peninsula”, “Silver City”) in 2004; details of sampling methods and site locations are in Marsh et al. (2006).

Results from 2009 field work were presented in Sanborn and Jull (2010), along with soil charcoal radiocarbon dates from 2003-2008 sampling which were used to reconstruct fire history in the Kluane Lake area. The 2003 (a single site at Silver City), 2004, and 2008 field work consisted of a reconnaissance of grassland and forest sites across a range of aspects and slope positions in order to recover buried soil charcoal.

For July 1-7, 2009, Dr. Paul Sanborn did the first soils field research at the Fort Selkirk volcanic field in central Yukon, with helicopter support and funding from the Yukon Geological Survey.

Initial findings were published in the 2009 edition of Yukon Exploration and Geology, but this paper did not include most of the laboratory data:
Sanborn, P., 2010. Soil reconnaissance of the Fort Selkirk volcanic field, Yukon (115I/13 and 14). In: Yukon Exploration and Geology 2009, K.E. MacFarlane, L.H. Weston and L.R. Blackburn (eds.), Yukon Geological Survey, Whitehorse, Yukon. pp. 293-304. https://emrlibrary.gov.yk.ca/ygs/yeg/2009/2009_p293-304.pdf [Note that in Fig. 1, the labels for Camp 1 and Camp 2 on map are transposed; Camp 1 should be to the east of Camp 2.]

The Lost Chicken Mine, a placer gold mine in eastern Alaska, approximately 120 km west of Dawson City, Yukon, is an important fossil locality for the late Pliocene (approximately 2.5 – 3.0 million years ago). A comprehensive account of the stratigraphy and paleontology of this site was given by:
Matthews, J.V., Jr., J.A. Westgate, L. Ovenden, L.D. Carter, and T. Fouch. 2003. Stratigraphy, fossils, and age of sediments at the upper pit of the Lost Chicken gold mine: new information on the late Pliocene environment of east central Alaska. Quaternary Research 60: 9-18. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0033-5894(03)00087-5

Dr. Paul Sanborn visited the site on July 20, 2004, as part of a group led by Duane Froese (Professor, University of Alberta). The group concentrated on a single exposure (~ 2 m thick) straddling the Lost Chicken tephra, a volcanic ash bed (2.9 ± 0.4 myr) which is a major stratigraphic marker at the site. Sanborn described, photographed, and sampled this exposure, and obtained a basic set of characterization data. Intact samples were collected but thin sections were never produced.

With support from the Muskwa-Kechika Trust Fund as a Seed Grant, Dr. Paul Sanborn carried out a pilot study of soils in relation to prescribed burning in the Northern Rocky Mountains, in collaboration with Perry Grilz, then a Range Officer in the Ministry of Forests. Sanborn and Grilz conducted 3 days of field work in July 2001. Sanborn wanted to test the utility of plant-derived opal (phytoliths) as a soil indicator of vegetation history, in the hope of distinguishing natural grasslands from those created by anthropogenic burning.