Inland waters are active sites of carbon cycling; they process, store, and emit more than half of the carbon (C) they receive as terrestrial inputs (Battin et al., 2009;Butman et al., 2018;Cole et al., 2007). An estimated 5.1 Pg C is loaded into inland waters from terrestrial landscapes every year, which can comprise anywhere from 12% to 34% of terrestrial net ecosystem productivity when scaled to global surface area (Butman et al., 2015;Drake et al., 2018). The difference between estimates of terrestrial C loading into and export from inland waters to the ocean (0.9 Pg C yr −1 export) highlights the active role inland waters play in removing C (4.2 Pg C yr −1 stored or emitted) (Butman et al., 2015;Drake et al., 2018). Regional and global C budgets and earth system models, however, often exclude the loss of C from land to aquatic ecosystems. Including freshwater C fluxes and cycling in global C budgets requires estimates of freshwater ecosystem metabolism as well as metabolism-informed calculations of C fluxes to inland waters from the surrounding landscape (Hotchkiss et al., 2015;Vachon et al., 2021).
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