Project description
Linking aquatic and terrestrial carbon cycles
Catchments are the areas of land that drain into a common waterway. They play a central role in regulating how carbon and nutrients move between land, water, and the atmosphere. Two interconnected metabolic processes characterise this movement: green metabolism, driven by vegetation on land, and blue metabolism, arising from biological and chemical processes in rivers and streams. Despite coexisting within the same landscape, these processes are rarely studied together, leaving major gaps in our understanding of the global carbon cycle. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the C-METABnG project aims to develop the first framework linking terrestrial and aquatic metabolism at the catchment scale to offer predictions of carbon dynamics under climate and land-use change.
Objective
Catchments are key regulators of carbon (C) and nutrient fluxes across terrestrial and aquatic domains, sustaining biodiversity, water quality, and the global carbon cycle. They involve two main sources of metabolic activity, defined as the fixation and dissipation of energy by all organisms: blue metabolism, arising from biogeochemical processes in flowing waters shaped by light, flow regimes, nutrient concentrations, and organic matter supply, and green metabolism, associated with terrestrial primary production driven by the uptake of light, energy, and water by vegetation. Aquatic and terrestrial metabolism contribute simultaneously to the land-atmosphere carbon fluxes, but, despite coexisting and interacting within catchments, their intertwined dynamics remain largely unaccounted for, leaving major uncertainties in how carbon is partitioned and routed along the land-water continuum. This represents a major challenge for predicting the response of catchment carbon dynamics to climate and land-use change, with profound implications for water quality, ecosystem resilience, and carbon-climate feedbacks.
The C-METABnG project will develop the first coupled framework of whole-catchment metabolism, explicitly linking blue and green metabolic activities and embedding the spatio-temporal variability of key resources such as hydroclimatic fluctuations. This addresses persistent uncertainties in the global carbon cycle, and the urgent need to improve predictability of catchment processes under climate change. To this end, the project will compile and harmonize a global dataset of blue and green metabolic observations, extend a process-based model to couple terrestrial fluxes with in-stream C processing, and advance a deterministic-probabilistic framework that captures resource variability. The ultimate goal is to provide the first predictive system for whole-catchment metabolism, directly responding to the call for integrated land-water carbon research.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences hydrology
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences atmospheric sciences climatology climatic changes
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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30123 Venezia
Italy
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