Browsing by Subject "River"

Groundwater has an important role in forging the composition of surface water, supplying nutrients crucial for the development of balanced ecosystems and potentially introducing contaminants into otherwise pristine surface water. Due to water-rock interactions radium (Ra) in groundwater is typically much more abundant than in surface water. In saline environments Ra is soluble and is considered a conservative tracer (apart for radioactive decay) for Ra-rich groundwater seepage. Hence in coastal environments, where mostly fresh groundwater seep into saline surface water, Ra has been the prominent tracer for tracking and modeling groundwater seepage over more than three decades. However, due to its reactivity and non-conservative behavior, Ra is rarely used for tracing groundwater seepage into fresh or hypersaline surface water; in freshwater, Ra is lost mostly through adsorption onto sediments and suspended particles; in hypersaline environments Ra can be removed through co-precipitation, most notably with sulfate salts.

This work examines the use of Ra as a tracer for groundwater seepage into freshwater lakes and rivers and into hypersaline lakes. The study examines groundwater-surface water interactions in four different environments and salinity ranges that include (1) saline groundwater discharge into a fresh water lake (the Sea of Galilee, Israel); (2) modification of pore water transitioning from saline to freshwater along their flow through sediments (pore water in sediments underlying the Sea of Galilee, Israel); (3) fresh groundwater discharge into hypersaline lakes (Sand Hills, Nebraska); and (4) fresh groundwater discharge into a fresh water river (Neuse River, North Carolina). In addition to measurement of the four Ra isotopes (226Ra, 228Ra, 223Ra, 224Ra), this study integrates geochemical (major and trace elements) with additional isotopic tools (strontium and boron isotopes) to better understand the geochemistry associated with the seepage process. To better understand the critical role of salinity on Ra adsorption, this study includes a series of adsorption experiments. The results of these experiments show that Ra loss through adsorption decreases with increasing salinity, and diminishes in salinity as low as ~5% of the salinity of seawater.

Integration of the geochemical data with mass-balance models corrected for adsorption allows estimating groundwater seepage into the Sea of Galilee (Israel) and the Neuse River (North Carolina). A study of the pore water underlying the Sea of Galilee shows significant modifications to the geochemistry and Ra activity of the saline pore water percolating through the sediments underlying the lake. In high salinity environments such as the saline lakes of the Nebraska Sand Hills, Ra is shown to be removed through co-precipitation with sulfate minerals, its integration into barite (BaSO₄) is shown to be limited by the ratio of Ra:Ba in the precipitating barite.

Overall, this work demonstrates that Ra is a sensitive tracer for quantifying groundwater discharge even in low-saline environments. Yet the high reactivity of Ra (adsorption, co-precipitation, production of the short-lived isotopes) requires a deep understanding of the geochemical processes that shape and control Ra abundances in water resources.

Patterns of primary productivity are primarily dictated by seasonal factors like light availability and temperature. In small rivers, primary productivity often peaks opposite that of terrestrial ecosystems, where overhanging canopies shade the river channel impeding light reaching the water surface. The degree to which river primary productivity is affected by the surrounding terrestrial environment depends on the river size. As rivers widen, river primary productivity increases, with more light reaching the stream channel. While light availability may set up the “window of metabolic opportunity” for river primary producers, factors like flow disturbance and grazing pressure from invertebrates can constrain the overall magnitude of gross primary productivity, or GPP. My dissertation seeks to evaluate what processes control the pattern and magnitude of primary productivity in rivers. I evaluate this driving question by analyzing the efficiency by which river ecosystems convert light energy into autotrophic biomass across 64 rivers (Chapter 2), through a series of in-depth experiments and careful monitoring of algae in a small forested river (Chapter 3), and in evaluating whether ice cover determines patterns of primary productivity along a river continuum (Chapter 4). Finally, I provide a framework for evaluating how climate change may be impacting the patterns of primary productivity in rivers (Chapter 5). In Chapter 2, we found that rivers are extremely efficient at converting light energy to biomass (i.e. have a high ecosystem light use efficiency, LUE). The range of LUEs reported in our study encompasses the entire range for any ecosystem LUE measured in forests, crops, lakes, and previous river studies. While river ecosystems have the potential to have high LUE on their “best days,” variability of flow constrains LUE throughout the year. In Chapter 3, we found that algae in the oligotrophic and steep headwaters of Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest were both more abundant than past studies and preferentially grew within substrates that simulate the physical structure of bryophytes. Throughout four separate nutrient diffusing substrate deployments, we found that nutrients rarely limited algal biomass. This chapter explores the previously unsuspected role of bryophytes in providing refugia for algae in this high-gradient and nutrient-poor stream. In Chapter 4, we combined three metrics of ice cover (satellite-, field camera-, and temperature-based) with a proxy for primary productivity across a river continuum. We found that satellite and field camera-based ice cover records reveal two important aspects of ice dynamics in a 3rd to 6th Strahler order river. First, river ice in narrow channels is dynamic, with more complete ice cover days and mid-winter breakups happening on the narrowest section of the reach. Second, ice cover is habitat-specific, with riffle sequences along the river never reaching complete ice cover. In comparing ice dynamics to a proxy of GPP, diel dissolved oxygen amplitude, we found that ice on rivers not only affects the overall pattern of primary productivity, but also affects our ability to measure primary productivity by affecting river gas exchange. Finally, in Chapter 5, I provide examples of relevant drivers of change for river ecosystem GPP in a warming climate. More studies that attempt to disentangle how climate change is affecting light availability, nutrients, temperature, ice cover, etc., or how climate change is shifting the “windows of metabolic opportunity” for rivers, will be imperative in the Anthropocene.

Rivers transform more than half of the organic inputs they receive from terrestrial systems through metabolic processes. In addition to providing the energetic base to sustain stream food webs, these transformations are linked to multiple elemental cycles and result in the release of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, oxygen depletion, and the mobilization of trace metals. Despite this central importance we lack a sufficient understanding of what drives processes within these ecosystems to make broad scale predictions about metabolic rates and biogeochemical cycles. This dissertation addresses how local controls interact with hydrologic and geomorphic constraints to determine the nature and magnitude of stream carbon and energy cycling. Through field observations and ecosystem process models, this study characterizes the spatial and seasonal biogeochemical dynamics of a single study system, New Hope Creek, a low gradient 3rd order river in the North Carolina Piedmont. I present a mechanistic explanation of stream ecosystem functioning from three different perspectives and use the insights gained to confront existing conceptual models and methods in river science. In chapter two, I examined the frequency and dynamics of river hypoxia, or depleted dissolved oxygen, in the North Carolina Piedmont by synthesizing state monitoring records since the 1960s and by collecting high resolution measurements of oxygen along a 20 km section of New Hope Creek. In chapter three, I monitored dissolved oxygen concentrations and modeled the metabolic regimes across six river segments over the course of three years. I compared the rates and seasonality of annual metabolism across space and time and examined the impact of climatic, hydrologic, and geomorphic drivers. Using the scales of this variation for context, I compared the metabolic regime in New Hope Creek today to a historical study of annual metabolism collected fifty years ago in the same site. In chapter four, I measured dissolved greenhouse gas concentrations from the autumn to the following spring at the six study locations from chapter three. I calculated the rate of exchange of CO2, CH4, N2O and O2 with the atmosphere, estimated the fraction of this flux that was attributable to instream metabolic processes, and determined the best predictors for each concentration and flux rate. The results from this research have implications for both conceptual models and methodological approaches. First, I found that hypoxia is widespread throughout New Hope Creek. It can arise through oxygen supply limitation due to seasonal low flows and warm water, even in the absence of high organic matter and nutrient loading. Hypoxia is most frequent at night and in pools, and is systematically underrepresented by state-wide monitoring records which rely on point samples and avoid both night and pools. Second, warmer water temperatures shift stream ecosystems toward more net heterotrophy. The effects of rising temperatures on stream ecosystem respiration are contingent upon organic matter inputs and storage, each of which are strongly constrained by flow regime and local geomorphology. Hydrologic settings in which storms are more frequent or more severe will drive high variability in the transport and fate of organic matter processing in streams. Third, the geomorphology and hydrology of New Hope Creek create conditions under which stream metabolic cycling is the dominant control on greenhouse gas concentrations and flux rates. These findings challenge preconceived notions about how rivers work and encourage us to reconsider conceptual models. Rivers are lotic ecosystems, which are defined by their advective flow, with the implication that they are well aerated and rarely hypoxic. Methods in stream ecology are not suited to study the conditions that arise during lentic, or non-flowing, time periods and as a result, the geomorphologies that create these conditions are avoided and understudied. However, these results suggest that they are control points of biogeochemical activity and that they may be more susceptible to change in response to anthropogenic drivers. Collectively, this study calls into question the binary distinction between lotic and lentic ecosystem dynamics with which we tend to categorize and study freshwater ecosystems. To understand the full range of variability of inland waters we must broaden our conceptual frameworks and adapt our methods of study to encompass ecosystems that span this divide.