Multi-Decadal Trends of Riverine Organic Carbon Fluxes in the South Saskatchewan River Basin, Canada
Abstract
Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) exports from terrestrial to aquatic environments are an important, but poorly constrained term in the Global carbon budget. In particular, for many parts of the world a lack of data has made it difficult to define whether DOC fluxes through aquatic networks are changing through time in response to changing patterns of human activity and shifting climatic conditions. Here, we use multi-decadal monitoring data for three continental Canadian sub-watersheds in the South Saskatchewan River Basin (SSRB) to establish DOC fluxes and their trajectories of change. In this understudied set of watersheds, annual fluxes ranged roughly between 1 to 10 Gg DOC/yr, on the low end for large North American Watersheds. Since the mid- to late 1980s, annual fluxes of DOC from each sub-watershed were variable, tracking discharge, but showed either no trend or slight increases through time, despite changing land use and water consumption patterns in these watersheds. These findings suggest that riverine DOC fluxes in the northern Great Plains region are showing a muted response to environmental changes, possibly due to compensatory processes, or that changes occurring in headwaters are dampened moving downstream in the fluvial network.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMB047.0012B
- Keywords:
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- 0414 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0439 Ecosystems;
- structure and dynamics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0458 Limnology;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0465 Microbiology: ecology;
- physiology and genomics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES