Towards Understanding the Effects of Climate and Land Cover Change on Dissolved Organic Carbon Export in Temperate Forest Catchments

Abstract

The amount of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in surface waters is an important water quality indicator. High levels of DOC in surface waters cause negative impacts on the aquatic ecosystem (e.g., via reducing light penetration and increasing water temperature) and increase the water treatment cost for drinking water supply. DOC mobilization and export from catchments into streams are hydrologically controlled and strongly affected by catchment-specific characteristics (such as topography, soils, and land cover type) and climatic factors. In this study, we developed a simplified process-based model that explicitly includes the hillslope, riparian, and groundwater compartments with the hydro-biogeochemical concept mainly based on the mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM) and INCA-Carbon models. The proposed model also allows dynamic carbon input from litterfall and root breakdown. We hypothesize that such a model is needed to understand the role of different catchment compartments and land cover and climate change on instream DOC export. We applied the proposed model for instream DOC simulation in four temperate forest and agriculture catchments located in the Harz Mountains, Germany. Here, we calibrated the model for the period which includes drought years (2018-2019) and the subsequent forest dieback (starting from 2018). The models showed satisfactory results in terms of instream DOC concentrations. Here, we will further evaluate if the model provides the right results for the right reasons by analyzing the physical soundness of the internal carbon export dynamics among different model compartments from our calibrated model. Such evaluation is important when further applying this modeling concept to other areas under similar circumstances.