USGS
Quantifying Alaskan Landscape Changes and Their Impacts on Greenhouse Emissions of Carbon Dioxide and Methane
Duration: 07/10/2017 – 07/09/2019
Award Amount:$140,000
Participants
PI in collaboration with A. D. McGuire and H. Genet
Project Objectives
Recent Alaskan carbon assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey revealed that our ability to quantify regional carbon dioxide and methane budgets is limited by lacking adequate aquatic biogeochemistry models. This proposed research will make use of the flux data of these gases developed by an Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) project in Alaska to test and refine our existing aquatic biogeochemistry models. These models will then be used to project future emissions of these gases from Alaskan freshwater ecosystems including lakes, ponds and rivers, which have experienced dramatic changes in their areas during the last century and will change under future warming conditions during the 21st century. This proposed research will also estimate how areas of these ecosystems will change in the 21st century using a land evolution model. The area estimates of land and aquatic ecosystems will be evaluated with satellite and survey data and other model estimates. The evaluated aquatic biogeochemistry models and future areal information will then be used to quantify future emissions of these gases. The models will also be used to quantify the emissions assuming that there are no areal changes in these ecosystems in the region for comparison. This study will build upon our existing developments of 1) landscape evolution modeling that considers the effects of cold region hydrological and permafrost dynamics and 2) greenhouse gas emission models for both land and aquatic ecosystems in the Arctic.