RELITORATE
Connecting the shore to the lake: towards revised carbon and greenhouse gas budgets of lake and land ecosystems
Details
- Period: 2025-01-01 – 2029-12-31
- Funder: Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
The littoral zone is an extensive habitat at the land-water interface of lakes, four times longer than the global ocean shoreline, and characterised by abundant growth of aquatic plants. The very high growth rates of these plants drive high carbon turnover. RELITORATE combines measurements of littoral carbon burial, greenhouse gas emission and lateral exchange, satellite and airborne remote sensing, as well as numerical modelling, to gain a comprehensive and quantitative understanding of littoral carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes, beyond the scale of individual lakes.
Abundant plant growth fringes the shorelines of lakes, with productivity rates as high as tropical rain forests, driving high carbon sequestration but also high emission of greenhouse gases. Yet, these littoral zones have largely been ignored in studies of carbon and greenhouse gas budgets, probably because littoral zones are spatially complex and difficult to study, and because they are transitional habitats outside the conventional realms of land or water.
This negligence of littoral zones implies that a hotspot of carbon burial and greenhouse gas emission is being missed. In addition, because the lateral loss of carbon that leaches from land ecosystems to inland waters is back-calculated from inland water carbon fluxes, conclusions on whether land ecosystems are carbon sinks or sources are biased.
In RELITORATE, a team of experts will collectively push the current state of science in flux measurement, remote sensing and numerical modelling in order to provide the first comprehensive quantifications of carbon and greenhouse gas budgets of littoral zones of lakes. The work is aligned to collectively generate quantifications of littoral carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes of entire lakes, and also at a regional scale. The overarching hypothesis that a significant share of inland water carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes (emission, belowground burial, riverine export) takes place in, or originates from, the littoral zone, implying that the back-calculated carbon leaching from land ecosystems to inland waters is overestimated.
The importance of the littoral zone was integral to early understanding of lake ecosystems, but it has later been largely overlooked: the vast majority of inland water research and monitoring focuses on open water. By integrating littoral zones into the carbon and greenhouse gas budgets of lakes, RELITORATE will upgrade current conceptualizations of carbon cycling in both lake and land ecosystems, and contribute to correct attribution of carbon sinks and sources on the continents.
The project is financed by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation. Read the press release (in Swedish) here.