Integrating the aquatic with the terrestrial component of the global carbon budget

The traditional compartmentalized approaches to developing inventories of carbons pools and fluxes in the biosphere have generated gaps in the form of key components. Among these key components, freshwater and wetland ecosystems, have been largely ignored or assumed negligible. Recent literature suggests that freshwater ecosystems contribute significantly to some regional carbon balances. We hypothesize, based on a preliminary assessment of the easily available data, that these key components are critical for a reliable estimation of carbon movements at a global scale as well. While the oceans and terrestrial forests are responsible for the net uptake of atmospheric CO2, freshwater ecosystems process a large amount of terrestrially-derived primary production and alter the balance between C sequestration and net CO2 release. This project aims at synthesizing existing information on the linkage between terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems to yield an improved representation of carbon cycling.