Significance Stream/river carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emission has significant spatial and seasonal variations critical for understanding its macroecosystem controls and plumbing of the terrestrial carbon budget. We relied on direct fluvial CO 2 partial pressure measurements and seasonally varying gas transfer velocity and river network surface area estimates to resolve reach-level seasonal variations of the flux at the global scale. The percentage of terrestrial primary production (GPP) shunted into rivers that ultimately contributes to CO 2 evasion increases with discharge across regions, due to a stronger response in fluvial CO 2 evasion to discharge than GPP. This highlights the importance of hydrology, in particular water throughput, in terrestrial–fluvial carbon transfers and the need to account for this effect in plumbing the terrestrial carbon budget.

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Lakes play an important role in the global carbon cycle, and littoral zones of lakes are potential hotspots of greenhouse gas production. In this study, we measured the partial pressures of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane (CH 4 ), and nitrous oxide (N 2 O) in the littoral zones of 17 lakes on the Tibetan Plateau. The littoral zones of lakes on the Tibetan Plateau were supersaturated and acted as sources of CO 2 , CH 4 , and N 2 O to the atmosphere. The average partial pressures of CO 2 , CH 4 , and N 2 O in the surface lake water were 664.8 ± 182.5, 139.8 ± 335.6, and 0.3 ± 0.1 μatm, respectively. The average diffusive fluxes (and uncentainty intervals) of these three gases were 73.7 (0.9-295.3) mmol · m À2 · day À1 , 5.2 (0.0008-45.9) mmol · m À2 · day À1 , and 6.5 (0.07-20.9) μmol · m À2 · day À1 , respectively. The diffusive fluxes of CO 2 in lakes were significantly correlated with dissolved organic carbon, dissolved organic nitrogen, salinity, and water temperature. The diffusive fluxes of N 2 O were significantly correlated with lake water depth. However, no relationships were found between environmental factors and the CH 4 diffusive flux at the scale of this study. CO 2 exchange with the atmosphere from saline lakes was found to be higher than from freshwater lakes with equivalent CO 2 concentrations by a factor of 2.5 due to chemical enhancement of the gas transfer velocity. Therefore, further study with enhanced spatiotemporal resolution and breadth is needed to better understand the important role played by lakes on the Tibetan Plateau in both regional and global carbon cycles.

Drought is common in rivers, yet how this disturbance regulates metabolic activity across network scales is largely unknown. Drought often lowers gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (ER) in small headwaters but by contrast can enhance GPP and cause algal blooms in downstream estuaries. We estimated ecosystem metabolism across a nested network of 13 reaches from headwaters to the main stem of the Connecticut River from 2015 through 2017, which encompassed a pronounced drought. During drought, GPP and ER increased, but with greater enhancement in larger rivers. Responses of GPP and ER were partially due to warmer temperatures associated with drought, particularly in the larger rivers where temperatures during summer drought were > 10 C higher than typical summer baseflow. The larger rivers also had low canopy cover, which allowed primary producers to take advantage of lower turbidity and fewer cloudy days during drought. We conclude that GPP is enhanced by higher temperature, lower turbidity, and longer water residence times that are all a function of low discharge, but ecosystem response in temperate watersheds to these drivers depends on light availability regulated by riparian canopy cover. In larger rivers, GPP increased more than ER during drought, even leading to temporary autotrophy, an otherwise rare event in the typically light-limited heterotrophic Connecticut River main stem. With climate change, rivers and streams may become warmer and drought frequency and severity may increase. Such changes may increase autotrophy in rivers with broad implications for carbon cycling and water quality in aquatic ecosystems.Droughts are a disturbance to river ecosystems with farreaching effects on their structure and function. As freshwaters enter drought, the physical template (e.g., temperature, turbidity, conductivity, and pH) of stream and river ecosystems changes. These fundamental habitat alterations affect all components of the food web and the physicochemical environment (Stanley et al. 1997;Dahm et al. 2003). Many of the changes to river networks during drought are stressful to biota,

Greenhouse gas evasion from inland waters is a globally significant yet highly uncertain flux, especially in regard to effects of wetlands and hydrologic variability. We sampled five first‐order and two second‐order streams with variable wetland influence during storm events for dissolved CO2, CH4, and N2O. We also calculated gas evasion rates. In first‐order streams, pCO2 and pN2O were significantly higher in the stream with the most wetland influence (mean ± 1 std: 3,965 ± 1,504 and 1.18 ± 0.37 μatm, respectively) than the forested stream (2,927 ± 439 and 0.47 ± 0.08 μatm, respectively). In second‐order streams, pCO2, pCH4, and pN2O were higher in the 14% wetland stream (3,274 ± 825, 501 ± 207, and 1.37 ± 0.43 μatm, respectively) than in the 2% wetland stream (1,858 ± 423, 137 ± 53, and 0.37 ± 0.08 μatm, respectively). In first‐order streams, pCO2 in streams with wetland influence increased during rain events, while pCO2 in streams with little to no wetland influence decreased or remained constant. Generally, pCH4 and pN2O followed the same trend, except in one stream with intermediate wetland influence. Gas transfer velocity increased in all streams during storm events. However, the forested streams had higher gas transfer velocities than the wetland streams due to steeper topography. CO2, CH4, and N2O evasion peaked in one of the intermediate wetland streams at high flow (maximum: 66 g C·m−2·day−1, 177 mg C·m−2·day−1, and 9.7 mg N·m−2·day−1, respectively). These findings suggest that gases are shunted downstream in flatter, wetland streams, while gases are evaded closer to their source in steeper, forested streams.

The role played by river networks in regional and global carbon cycle is receiving increasing attention. Despite the potential of radiocarbon measurements (14C) to elucidate sources and cycling of different riverine carbon pools, there remain large regions such as the climate-sensitive Tibetan Plateau for which no data are available. Here we provide new 14C data on dissolved organic carbon (DOC) from three large Asian rivers (the Yellow, Yangtze and Yarlung Tsangpo Rivers) running on the Tibetan Plateau and present the carbon transportation pattern in rivers of the plateau versus other river system in the world. Despite higher discharge rates during the high flow season, the DOC yield of Tibetan Plateau rivers (0.41 gC m-2 yr-1) was lower than most other rivers due to lower concentrations. Radiocarbon ages of the DOC were older/more depleted (511±294 years before present, yr BP) in the Tibetan rivers than those in Arctic and tropical rivers. A positive correlation between radiocarbon age and permafrost watershed coverage was observed, indicating that 14C-deplted/old carbon is exported from permafrost regions of the Tibetan Plateau during periods of high flow. This is in sharp contrast to permafrost regions of the Arctic which export 14C-enriched carbon during high discharge periods.

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions from streams are important to regional biogeochemical budgets. This study is one of the first to incorporate stream GHGs (CO2, CH4 and N2O) concentrations and emissions in rivers of the Tibetan Plateau. With one-time sampling from 32 sites in rivers of the plateau, we found that most of the rivers were supersaturated with CO2, CH4 and N2O during the study period. Medians of partial pressures of CO2 (pCO2), pCH4 and pN2O were presented 864 μatm, 6.3 μatm, and 0.25 μatm respectively. Based on a scaling model of the flux of gas, the calculated fluxes of CO2, CH4 and N2O (3,452 mg-C m2 d−1, 26.7 mg-C m2 d−1 and 0.18 mg-N m2 d−1, respectively) in rivers of the Tibetan Plateau were found comparable with most other rivers in the world; and it was revealed that the evasion rates of CO2 and CH4 in tributaries of the rivers of the plateau were higher than those in the mainstream despite its high altitude. Furthermore, concentrations of GHGs in the studied rivers were related to dissolved carbon and nitrogen, indicating that riverine dissolved components could be used to scale GHGs envision in rivers of the Tibetan Plateau.

Anthropogenic activities have led to increases in nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from river systems, but there are large uncertainties in estimates due to lack of data in tropical rivers and rapid increase in human activity. We assessed the effects of land use and river size on N2O flux and concentration in 46 stream sites in the Mara River, Kenya, during the transition from the wet (short rains) to dry season, November 2017 to January 2018. Flux estimates were similar to other studies in tropical and temperate systems, but in contrast to other studies, land use was more related to N2O concentration and flux than stream size. Agricultural stream sites had the highest fluxes (26.38 ± 5.37 N2O‐N μg·m–2·hr–1) compared to both forest and livestock sites (5.66 ± 1.38 N2O‐N μg·m–2·hr–1 and 6.95 ± 2.96 N2O‐N μg·m–2·hr–1, respectively). N2O concentrations in forest and agriculture streams were positively correlated to stream carbon dioxide (CO2‐C(aq)) but showed a negative correlation with dissolved organic carbon, and the dissolved organic carbon:dissolved inorganic nitrogen ratio. N2O concentration in the livestock sites had a negative relationship with CO2‐C(aq) and a higher number of negative fluxes. We concluded that in‐stream chemoautotrophic nitrification was likely the main biogeochemical process driving N2O production in agricultural and forest streams, whereas complete denitrification led to the consumption of N2O in the livestock stream sites. These results point to the need to better understand the relative importance of nitrification and denitrification in different habitats in producing N2O and for process‐based studies.