Abstract
Abstract. Repeated sampling of spatially distributed river chemistry can be used to assess the location, scale, and persistence of carbon and nutrient contributions to watershed exports. Here, we provide a comprehensive set of water chemistry measurements and ecohydrological metrics describing the biogeochemical conditions of permafrost-affected Arctic watersheds. These data were collected in watershed-wide synoptic campaigns in six stream networks across northern Alaska. Three watersheds are associated with the Arctic Long-Term Ecological Research site at Toolik Field Station (TFS), which were sampled seasonally each June and August from 2016 to 2018. Three watersheds were associated with the National Park Service (NPS) of Alaska and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and were sampled annually from 2015 to 2019. Extensive water chemistry characterization included carbon species, dissolved nutrients, and major ions. The objective of the sampling designs and data acquisition was to characterize terrestrial–aquatic linkages and processing of material in stream networks. The data allow estimation of novel ecohydrological metrics that describe the dominant location, scale, and overall persistence of ecosystem processes in continuous permafrost. These metrics are (1) subcatchment leverage, (2) variance collapse, and (3) spatial persistence. Raw data are available at the National Park Service Integrated Resource Management Applications portal (O'Donnell et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9SBK2DZ) and within the Environmental Data Initiative (Abbott, 2021, https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/258a44fb9055163dd4dd4371b9dce945).
Highlights
Watershed chemistry studies – like all ecosystem studies – involve trade-offs between sampling extent and spatiotemporal grain (Abbott et al, 2018; Burns et al, 2019; Ward et al, 2019)
The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), which indicates the presence of green vegetation, was derived from imagery acquired in summer 2012 by the ETM+ sensor on Landsat 7
We measured dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and total dissolved nitrogen (TDN) with a total carbon analyzer (Shimadzu TOC-LCPH with a total nitrogen analyzer and ASI-L autosampler)
Summary
Watershed chemistry studies – like all ecosystem studies – involve trade-offs between sampling extent (i.e., how much area is observed) and spatiotemporal grain (i.e., the resolution of observations in space and time) (Abbott et al, 2018; Burns et al, 2019; Ward et al, 2019). The paired high-frequency flow and a limited set of chemical properties for the watersheds in this data paper are available at the Arctic Data Center (Zarnetske et al, 2020b, c, a) While these watershed outlet measurements can provide insight into possible upstream and upslope processes (Laudon et al, 2017; Shogren et al, 2021; Moatar et al, 2017), they often do not diagnose primary drivers of lateral transport of materials (Burns et al, 2019; Appling et al, 2018; Temnerud et al, 2010; Hoffman et al, 2013; Collier et al, 2018). Spatial persistence effectively quantifies the temporal representativeness of an instantaneous measurement at a given site, potentially indicating the type of process creating the patterns and informing future watershed study design and data analysis of extant data (Kling et al, 2000; Shogren et al, 2019)
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