Catchment METAbolism of Blue and Green fluxes

Descripción del proyecto

Vincular los ciclos del carbono acuático y terrestre

Las cuencas hidrográficas son las áreas de tierra que drenan hacia un curso de agua común. Desempeñan un papel fundamental en la regulación del movimiento del carbono y los nutrientes entre la tierra, el agua y la atmósfera. Este movimiento se caracteriza por dos procesos metabólicos interconectados: el metabolismo verde, impulsado por la vegetación terrestre, y el metabolismo azul, que surge de los procesos biológicos y químicos en ríos y arroyos. A pesar de coexistir en el mismo entorno, estos procesos rara vez se estudian en conjunto, lo que deja importantes lagunas en nuestra comprensión del ciclo global del carbono. Con el apoyo de las Acciones Marie Skłodowska-Curie, el equipo del proyecto C-METABnG tiene como objetivo desarrollar el primer marco que vincule el metabolismo terrestre y acuático a escala de cuenca hidrográfica para ofrecer predicciones de la dinámica del carbono en el contexto del cambio climático y del uso del suelo.

Objetivo

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.