The importance of hydrology in routing terrestrial carbon to the atmosphere via global streams and rivers

Shaoda Liu; Catherine Kuhn; Giuseppe Amatulli; Kelly Aho; David E Butman; George H Allen; Peirong Lin; Ming Pan; Dai Yamazaki; Craig Brinkerhoff; Colin Gleason; Xinghui Xia; Peter A Raymond

doi:10.1073/pnas.2106322119

The importance of hydrology in routing terrestrial carbon to the atmosphere via global streams and rivers

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Mar 15;119(11):e2106322119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2106322119. Epub 2022 Mar 7.

Authors

Shaoda Liu^{1

2}, Catherine Kuhn³, Giuseppe Amatulli^{1

4}, Kelly Aho¹, David E Butman^{3

5}, George H Allen⁶, Peirong Lin^{7

8}, Ming Pan^{8

9}, Dai Yamazaki¹⁰, Craig Brinkerhoff¹¹, Colin Gleason¹¹, Xinghui Xia², Peter A Raymond^{1

12}

Affiliations

¹ School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511.
² State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875 China.
³ School of Environmental and Forest Science, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195.
⁴ Center for Research Computing, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511.
⁵ School of Engineering and Environmental Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195.
⁶ Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843.
⁷ Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871 China.
⁸ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544.
⁹ Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093.
¹⁰ Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 153-8505 Japan.
¹¹ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003.
¹² Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511.

Abstract

SignificanceStream/river carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission has significant spatial and seasonal variations critical for understanding its macroecosystem controls and plumbing of the terrestrial carbon budget. We relied on direct fluvial CO₂ partial pressure measurements and seasonally varying gas transfer velocity and river network surface area estimates to resolve reach-level seasonal variations of the flux at the global scale. The percentage of terrestrial primary production (GPP) shunted into rivers that ultimately contributes to CO₂ evasion increases with discharge across regions, due to a stronger response in fluvial CO₂ evasion to discharge than GPP. This highlights the importance of hydrology, in particular water throughput, in terrestrial-fluvial carbon transfers and the need to account for this effect in plumbing the terrestrial carbon budget.

Keywords: biogeochemistry; carbon dioxide; greenhouse gases; hydrology; inland waters.

Associated data

Dryad/10.5061/dryad.d7wm37pz9

Grants and funding

80NSSC19M0104/ImNASA/Intramural NASA/United States