Talk:Why lakes and organic carbon cycling

From Hanson et al., in review: Lakes are important sites for organic carbon storage in sediments and for transfer of CO2 to the atmosphere with annual global fluxes of petagrams of carbon (J. J. Cole et al., 2007; Raymond et al., 2013; Tranvik et al., 2009). The recognition that lakes are important sites for OC cycling has sparked discussions of altering broad-scale C cycling frameworks to include inland waters (Regnier et al., 2013). However, a dearth of ecosystem-scale budgets for lake OC limits inclusion of lakes in C cycling assessments. As a result, dissonant views have emerged about both the roles lakes play in processing catchment OC and the consequences of that load for lake processes. For example: while lakes store large quantities of OC (Einsele, 2001; Stallard, 1998), they also tend to be sources of CO2 to the atmosphere (J. Cole, Caraco, Kling, & Kratz, 1994; Roehm, Prairie, & del Giorgio, 2009; Sobek, Algesten, Bergstrom, Jansson, & Tranvik, 2003); the euphotic zone of a lake may be net autotrophic (Paul C. Hanson, Bade, Carpenter, & Kratz, 2003), while the lake as a whole may be net heterotrophic (P.C. Hanson et al., 2004); the particulate fraction of water column OC pool may be autochthonous in origin, while the dissolved fraction is primarily allochthonous (Wilkinson, Pace, & Cole, 2013); allochthonous OC subsidizes aquatic food webs (Pace et al., 2004), but the extent of that subsidy is debated (Jones, Solomon, & Weidel, 2012).