Modeling of coupled water and carbon fluxes in a black spruce dominated ecosystem in Eastern Canada.
Global change affects Biogeochemical cycles (BGCs). However, their magnitudes, direction and feedback relationships are still a matter of speculation to the scientific community. Carbon cycle, an important BGC, has a large uncertainty especially in terrestrial ecosystems where anthropogenic influences are most prevalent. Experimental projects like BOREAS and EUROFLUX have recognized the tight coupling between hydrological and carbon cycles, with mechanisms/processes operating differently at different spatio-temporal scales. Most of the modeling efforts, hitherto, do not explicitly quantify the effects of lateral hydrological processes on carbon cycle, even though they are tightly linked. I am involved in the Fluxnet Canada Research Network (FCRN), which is a national collaborative research network involving university and government scientists to study the influence of climate and disturbance on carbon cycling in Canadian forest and peat land ecosystems.We use tower-based eddy covariance technique to make continuous, multi-year measurements of CO2, latent and sensible heat fluxes, for mature and disturbed forest and peat-land ecosystems covering Canada's important eco-regions. Being a part of the integrated modeling group, my interests primarily focuson (1) modeling of coupled carbon and hydrological processes using Boreal Ecosystem Productivity Simulator (BEPS, a process model simulating primary production, having spatial and temporal scaling mechanisms) and Terrain Lab(a distributed hydrological model) at watershed scale. (2) Simulation of historical carbon cycle to understand the trends in carbon sequestration in a mature black spruce dominated ecosystem in eastern Canada, under climate change and disturbance scenario (3)Development of scaling strategies for processes involving (a)ecosystem primary production: using canopy radiative transfer mechanisms for multilayered and differentially illuminated canopies (b) eco-hydrologic processes: including thermo-hydraulic properties for peat-moss complexes as well as mineral soils. Preliminary results show that (i) it is possible to quantify the ecological processes with reasonable accuracies (ii) the influence of lateral water fluxes on gross primary productivity could be as high as 15%! My research work will therefore answer key questions regarding the tight coupling of hydrology and carbon cycle in boreal forests, and therefore the sustainability of this carbon sink.
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