Evasion of CO2 from streams – The dominant component of the carbon export through the aquatic conduit in a boreal landscape

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 land-water-atmosphere 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 67km(2) boreal catchment was studied. During a 4year period (2006-2009) 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 (5×5m) 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(-2) yr(-1) ) of the entire stream C flux (9.6 (±2.4) gCm(-2) yr(-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.