Xingyuan Chen
Earth ScientistPacific Northwest National Laboratory
Tuesday, March 12 at 1:00-2:00 PM PT / 4:00-5:00 PM ET
ABSTRACT
Watersheds play significant roles in modulating carbon and nitrogen cycling and removal of excess nutrients. The incorporation of hydrologic complexity and molecular-level characterization such as organic carbon chemistry will greatly improve a watershed hydrobiogeochemical model in capturing distinct water quality signatures across variations in land use, hydrogeology, climate, and disturbances. We have developed a modeling pipeline that connects molecular characteristics with biogeochemical models and watershed reactive transport models. The organic carbon chemistry inferred from FTICR-MS measurements is used to generate new reaction networks and kinetics, which are subsequently tested in PFLOTRAN in batch settings before being incorporated into ATS-PFLOTRAN for coupled hydrologic and biogeochemical modeling at the watershed scale. We used this coupled model to study biogeochemical transformations of carbon and nitrogen in the Yakima River Basin, located in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The biogeochemical hot spots and hot moments within the river corridors were found to be strongly influenced by export of terrestrial carbon as controlled by interactions among land use, hydrogeology, climate, and disturbances. This pipeline can be extended to allow the incorporation of other omics datasets (such as metatranscripts, metaproteomics and metabolomics) when they become available. This work is enabled by the partnership between the IDEAS-Watersheds and the River Corridor Science Focus Area. Our modeling capability and pipeline are open to the broader community to enable similar hydrobiogeochemical studies in other watersheds and river corridors.
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