Episodic soil erosion and deposition play an important role on carbon dynamics, as they are capable of altering the rate of carbon mineralization. Assessing the impact of landscape evolution on soil organic carbon dynamics may provide insights on the net carbon fluxes at basin scale and a critical step in understanding challenges that may be posed by climate change. This study seeks to answer how past erosion in the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory has redistributed and altered the dynamics of soil organic carbon. This involves complex processes affected by multiple factors such as soil, weather, soil moisture dynamics, and agricultural practice.

The impact of soil erosion and deposition on the dynamics of soil organic carbon can be simulated by using the tRIBS-ECO (Triangulated Irregular Network-based Real-time Integrated Basin Simulator-Erosion and Carbon Oxidation), which is based on an existing coupled hydro-geomorphic model (Francipane et al., 2012; Ivavov et al., 2004). The spatially- and depth-explicit model implements a physically-based approach that stresses the fine dynamics and spatial heterogeneity of episodic carbon erosion and atmospheric carbon sequestration, and systematically tracks the dynamics of eroded soil organic carbon at the watershed scale.

References

Francipane, A., Ivanov, V. Y., Noto, L. V., Istanbulluoglu, E., Arnone, E., & Bras, R. L. (2012). tRIBS-Erosion: A parsimonious physically-based model for studying catchment hydro-geomorphic response. Catena, 92, 216-231.

Ivanov, V. Y., Vivoni, E. R., Bras, R. L., & Entekhabi, D. (2004). Catchment hydrologic response with a fully distributed triangulated irregular network model. Water Resources Research, 40(11).