Biological Sciences

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Browsing Biological Sciences by Author "Badiou, Pascal"

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    Agricultural land use impacts aquatic greenhouse gas emissions from wetlands in the Canadian Prairie Pothole Region
    (AGU, 2025) Logozzo, Laura A.; Soued, Cynthia; Bortolotti, Lauren E.; Badiou, Pascal; Kowal, Paige; Bogard, Matthew J.
    The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is the largest wetland complex in North America, with millions of wetlands punctuating the landscapes of Canada and the United States. Here, wetlands have been dramatically impacted by agricultural land use, with unclear implications for regional to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions budgets. By surveying wetlands across all three Canadian prairie provinces in the PPR, we show that emissions patterns of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) from aquatic habitats differ among wetlands embedded in cropland versus perennial landcover. Wetlands in cropped landscapes had double the aquatic diffusive emissions (17.8 ± 29.3 vs. 7.7 ± 13.9 g CO2-eq m−2 d−1) largely driven by CH4. Structural equation modeling showed that all three GHGs responded differently to the surrounding landscape properties. Emissions of CH4 were the most sensitive to land use, responding positively to the elevated phosphorus content and lower sulfate content in cropped settings, despite higher organic matter content in wetlands in perennial landscapes. Aquatic N2O emissions were negligible, while CO2 emissions were high, but not strongly related to agricultural land use. While our estimates of aquatic CH4 emissions from PPR wetlands were high (15.6 ± 37.2 mmol CH4 m−2 d−1), accounting for fluxes from vegetated and soil habitats would lead to whole-wetland emissions rates that are lower and comparable to wetlands in other biomes. Our study represents an important step toward understanding wetland emission responses to land use in the PPR and other wetland-rich agricultural landscapes.
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    Salinity causes widespread restriction of methane emissions from small inland waters
    (Springer Nature, 2024) Soued, Cynthia; Bogard, Matthew J.; Finlay, Kerri; Bortolotti, Lauren E.; Leavitt, Peter R.; Badiou, Pascal; Knox, Sara H.; Jensen, Sydney; Mueller, Peka; Lee, Sung Ching; Ng, Darian; Wissel, Björn; Chan, Chun Ngai; Page, Bryan; Kowal, Paige
    Inland waters are one of the largest natural sources of methane (CH4), a potent greenhouse gas, but emissions models and estimates were developed for solute-poor ecosystems and may not apply to salt-rich inland waters. Here we combine field surveys and eddy covariance measurements to show that salinity constrains microbial CH4 cycling through complex mechanisms, restricting aquatic emissions from one of the largest global hardwater regions (the Canadian Prairies). Existing models overestimated CH4 emissions from ponds and wetlands by up to several orders of magnitude, with discrepancies linked to salinity. While not significant for rivers and larger lakes, salinity interacted with organic matter availability to shape CH4 patterns in small lentic habitats. We estimate that excluding salinity leads to overestimation of emissions from small Canadian Prairie waterbodies by at least 81% ( ~ 1 Tg yr−1 CO2 equivalent), a quantity comparable to other major national emissions sources. Our findings are consistent with patterns in other hardwater landscapes, likely leading to an overestimation of global lentic CH4 emissions. Widespread salinization of inland waters may impact CH4 cycling and should be considered in future projections of aquatic emissions.