The objective of this research was to quantify the temporal variation of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in five distinct waterbodies in watersheds with diverse types of land use and land cover in the presence and absence of sunlight. The water bodies were an agricultural pond, a lake in a forested watershed, a man-made reservoir, an estuary, and a bay. Two sets of samples were prepared by dispensing unfiltered samples into filtered samples in 1:10 ratio (V/V). The first set was exposed to sunlight (10 hr per day for 30 days) for examining the combined effect of photo-biodegradation, while the second set was stored in dark for examining biodegradation alone. Spectroscopic measurements in tandem with multivariate statistics were used to interpret DOM lability and composition. The results suggest that the agricultural pond behaved differently compared to other study locations during degradation experiments due to the presence of higher amount of microbial humic-like and protein-like components derived from microbial/anthropogenic sources. For all samples, a larger decrease in dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration (10.12% ± 9.81% for photo-biodegradation and 6.65% ± 2.83% for biodegradation) and rapid transformation of DOM components (i.e., terrestrial humic-like components into microbial humic and protein-like components) were observed during photo-biodegradation experiments. Results suggest that sunlight facilitated DOM biodegradation, resulting in simpler recalcitrant molecules regardless of original composition. Overall, it was found that combined effects of light and bacteria are more efficient than bacterial effects alone in remineralizing and altering DOM, which highlights the crucial importance of sunlight in transforming aquatic DOM.
Keywords: Biodegradation; Dissolved organic matter; EEM-PARAFAC; Half-life; Land use and land cover; Photo-biodegradation.
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