A multiscale approach to modeling carbon cycling within a high-elevation watershed (Final Report)

The rates of soil carbon accumulation, transformation and release to the atmosphere and surface waters remain a key uncertainty in global-scale models. Within the soil environment, residual plant material is transformed into a continuum of organic products of variable accessibility and reactivity. At the watershed scale, averaging over complex soil reaction networks may obscure critical processes; whereas individual soil profiles provide a limited view of the ensemble of pathways that ultimately determines carbon fluxes. To address how collections of spatially and temporally linked reaction networks are manifest at larger scales and the consequences of scale for process-based models, we are studying C fluxes at molecular-level all the way to the watershed-scale within the LBNL SFA East River, CO watershed study site.