This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Stream networks are intimately connected to the landscapes through which they flow and significantly transform nutrients and organic matter that are in transport from landscapes to oceans. This work will quantify the relative influences of throughflow, lateral inputs, and hyporheic (a layer of surface sediments that contains water which exchanges continuously with water in the open channel) regeneration on the seasonal fluxes of C, N, and P in an arctic river network, and determine how these influences will shift under seasonal conditions that are likely to be substantially different in the future. This objective is a logical extension of earlier. This work will focus on seasonal dynamics at different river reach scales (1st to 4th order streams) and will lay the groundwork for a whole river network model to integrate the influences of throughflow, lateral inputs, hyporheic regeneration, and in-stream metabolism on C, N, and P fluxes through an entire river network.
