Abstract
It has been reported that significant quantities of greenhouse gases are emitted from wetlands, from which emissions and their contributions to global warming have received much less attentions. Thus, a refinement to the previous published guidelines has recently been made to provide an updated and sound scientific basis for the purpose of supporting the preparation of national inventories. This study is aimed at demonstrating the applicability of the refinement for estimating methane emissions from reservoirs in the Republic of Korea. It is desirable to take the direct measurement of total methane fluxes across the reservoir surface, which may require a substantial amount of research efforts though. Alternatively, methane emissions from individual reservoirs may be estimated with relevant parameters accounting for the regional environmental characteristics. The assessment of trophic state has been employed to better represent the emissions behavior of reservoirs, based on which the methane emissions from local reservoirs in Korea are estimated. It is noted that the country has developed its own water quality index with the consideration of environmental characteristics. The seasonal variations in methane emissions are tested for their statistical significance and it is proposed that the emission estimates can be predicted from the trophic state assessment with the application of regression analysis. Following the guidelines prescribed by the refinement and procedures outlined in this study, the results from emissions estimation and prediction can be effectively used for the improvement of national inventories.
Highlights
The world’s water reservoirs are annually emitting carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) in significant quantities, depending on a variety of different characteristics such as age, land-use prior to flooding, climate, upstream catchment and management practices [1]
The Korean trophic state index TSIKR is used for identifying the trophic class of reservoirs to take regional environmental characteristics into account
The trophic state assessment is performed season by season in an effort to include the seasonal variations in the estimation of methane emissions from reservoirs
Summary
The world’s water reservoirs are annually emitting carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) in significant quantities, depending on a variety of different characteristics such as age, land-use prior to flooding, climate, upstream catchment and management practices [1]. Most attempts are centered on upscaling the GHG emission rates from individual waterbodies to the regional or global estimates and multiplying an average emission rate by the total waterbody surface area in the region of interest [8,9,10,11]. It is pointed out in [12] that this upscaling approach can be highly biased unless the emission rate measurements come from a representative sample of lakes or reservoirs in the region of interest
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