Noacco, Valentina and Wagener, Thorsten and Worrall, Fred and Burt, Tim P. and Howden, Nicholas J. K. (2017) 'Human impact on long-term organic carbon export to rivers.', Journal of geophysical research : biogeosciences., 122 (4). pp. 947-965.
Abstract
Anthropogenic landscape alterations have increased global carbon transported by rivers to oceans since preindustrial times. Few suitable observational data sets exist to distinguish different drivers of carbon increase, given that alterations only reveal their impact on fluvial dissolved organic carbon (DOC) over long time periods. We use the world's longest record of DOC concentrations (130 years) to identify key drivers of DOC change in the Thames basin (UK). We show that 90% of the long-term rise in fluvial DOC is explained by increased urbanization, which released to the river 671 kt C over the entire period. This source of carbon is linked to rising population, due to increased sewage effluent. Soil disturbance from land use change explained shorter-term fluvial responses. The largest land use disturbance was during the Second World War, when almost half the grassland area in the catchment was converted into arable land, which released 45 kt C from soils to the river. Carbon that had built up in soils over decades was released to the river in only a few years. Our work suggests that widespread population growth may have a greater influence on fluvial DOC trends than previously thought.
Item Type: | Article |
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Full text: | (VoR) Version of Record Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution. Download PDF (2232Kb) |
Status: | Peer-reviewed |
Publisher Web site: | https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JG003614 |
Publisher statement: | ©2017. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Date accepted: | 31 March 2017 |
Date deposited: | 01 June 2017 |
Date of first online publication: | 28 April 2017 |
Date first made open access: | 01 June 2017 |
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