Aquatic carbon cycling in the conterminous United States and implications for terrestrial carbon accounting

Inland water ecosystems dynamically process, transport, and sequester carbon. However, the transport of carbon through aquatic environments has not been quantitatively integrated in the context of terrestrial ecosystems. Here, we present the first integrated assessment, to our knowledge, of freshwater carbon fluxes for the conterminous United States, where 106 (range: 71–149) teragrams of carbon per year (TgC⋅y−1) is exported downstream or emitted to the atmosphere and sedimentation stores 21 (range: 9–65) TgC⋅y−1 in lakes and reservoirs. We show that there is significant regional variation in aquatic carbon flux, but verify that emission across stream and river surfaces represents the dominant flux at 69 (range:...

Categories: Publication; Types: Journal Citation; Tags: Aquatic carbon, Carbon flux, Conterminous United States, Inland waters, Terrestrial carbon

Suisun Marsh, CA: Net Ecosystem Carbon Balance

Our research focuses on assessing the components of the Net Ecoystem Carbon Balance using the eddy covariance approach to measure atmospheric fluxes of heat, energy, carbon dioxide and methane and testing equipment and techniques to measure the tidal exchange of dissolved organic (DOC) and inorganic carbon (DIC). The atmospheric flux tower is located south of Solano Land Trust's Rush Ranch, a working ranch encompassing 2,070 acres of marsh and rolling grasslands that provides both recreational and educational experiences for the public (http://www.solanolandtrust.org/RushRanch.aspx). Lateral fluxes are being collected at the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve First Mallard water quality station...

Categories: Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: Annual variability, Aquatic Carbon, Atmospheric fluxes, Biogeochemistry, CH4 emissions, All tags... CO2 emissions, California, California Delta, Carbon balance, Carbon cycle, Carbon dynamics, Carbon flux, Carbon sequestration, Carbon stock, Land use and Land cover, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, Soil carbon, Staging, Suisun Marsh, Terrestrial carbon, Wetlands, Fewer tags

Continental-scale overview of stream primary productivity, its links to water quality, and consequences for aquatic carbon biogeochemistry

Streams and rivers have a limited spatial extent, but are increasingly recognized as key components of regional biogeochemical cycles. The collective metabolic processing of organisms, known as ecosystem metabolism, is centrally important to nutrient cycling and carbon fluxes in these environments, but is poorly integrated into emerging biogeochemical concepts. This line of inquiry lags behind other aspects of regional biogeochemistry because of the lack of long-term, regionally-diverse studies of stream metabolism. With a few exceptions, metabolism studies have focused on small headwater catchments using short-term (days to weeks) observation. As a consequence, basic patterns and controls of this fundamental process,...

Categories: Data, Project; Tags: Active, All Working Groups, Aquatic carbon, Ecosystems, Water Quality, All tags... Water Resources, water, Fewer tags