Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The Western Boreal Forest (WBF) zone is a mosaic of peatlands, ponds (wetlands) and uplands whose surface water hydrology is closely linked to climate, evapotranspiration (ET), and antecedent soil/groundwater conditions. Wetland loss and trace gas emissions are important areas of concern within the WBF with implications for water resources, carbon sequestration, greenhouse gas emissions and habitat preservation, and is threatened by forestry, oil and gas development, and climate change (drought). An understanding of the persistence and seasonal dynamics of wetland hydrology and trace gas biogeochemistry linkages is essential to predict how both climate and disturbance might affect climatic feedbacks within the WBF. Quantifying landscape unit ecohydrological and biogeochemical feedback processes will facilitate a better understanding of the potential response of these systems to any potential natural or anthropogenic disturbances. Current approaches to describe linkages between a systems ecohydrology and trace gas fluxes in this region are uncertain because of difficulty obtaining the detailed environmental and flux measurements at this scale over any appreciable time scale. There is a need for an integrated study of the processes governing moisture storage and transport and trace gas emissions, scaling from the vegetation community through the landscape unit scales permitting the scaling up from the mosaic to the general landscape & relating these fluxes to soil/groundwater, hillslope, and runoff generation dynamics. The objective of this study is to scale vegetation community fluxes of CO2, N2O and CH4 using fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and soil and plant moisture measurements in a forested wetland pond complex, providing the needed information to better understand the hydrologic influences on trace gas biogeochemistry behavior of systems already under study in this region. The proposed study is innovative in that it is a total collaborative effort incorporating groundwater up to atmospheric processes, and has direct implications for the climatic feedbacks of wetland pond complexes and how they may respond to natural and man made disturbances.