Wallin, Marcus
- Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Uppsala University
Abstract
Evasion of gaseous carbon (C) from streams is often poorly quantified in landscape C budgets. Even though the potential importance of the capillary network of streams as C conduits across the landwateratmosphere interfaces is sometimes mentioned, low-order streams are often left out of budget estimates due to being poorly characterized in terms of gas exchange and even areal surface coverage. We show that evasion of C is greater than all the total dissolved C (both organic and inorganic) exported downstream in the waters of a boreal landscape. In this study evasion of carbon dioxide (CO2) from running waters within a 67km2 boreal catchment was studied. During a 4year period (20062009) 13 streams were sampled on 104 different occasions for dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC). From a locally determined model of gas exchange properties, we estimated the daily CO2 evasion with a high-resolution (5x5m) grid-based stream evasion model comprising the entire 100km stream network. Despite the low areal coverage of stream surface, the evasion of CO2 from the stream network constituted 53% (5.0 (+/- 1.8) gCm-2yr-1) of the entire stream C flux (9.6 (+/- 2.4) gCm-2yr-1) (lateral as DIC, DOC, and vertical as CO2). In addition, 72% of the total CO2 loss took place already in the first- and second-order streams. This study demonstrates the importance of including CO2 evasion from low-order boreal streams into landscape C budgets as it more than doubled the magnitude of the aquatic conduit for C from this landscape. Neglecting this term will consequently result in an overestimation of the terrestrial C sink strength in the boreal landscape.
Keywords
carbon budget; Greenhouse gases; headwaters; inland waters; water-atmosphere exchange
Published in
Global Change Biology
2013, volume: 19, number: 23, pages: 785-797
SLU Authors
Laudon, Hjalmar
- Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Ågren, Anneli
- Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Öquist, Mats
- Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Bishop, Kevin
- Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Associated SLU-program
SLU Future Forests
UKÄ Subject classification
Forest Science
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12083
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/50359