Climate change is fundamentally altering coastal carbon cycles, by altering linkages among the land-air-water spatial domains. These alterations have been documented for the past 20-30 years due to increases in extreme weather events (fires, drought, tropical cyclones). Conceptually, these events are episodic and represent pulses experienced by the affected ecosystems, as opposed to the gradual presses (sea level rise, land use change), often under which the pulses occur. Responses to these events can reorganize coastal carbon cycles by translocating enormous amounts of carbon and nutrients (e.g., N and P) stored in coastal landscapes to the coastal ocean via biogeochemically active terrestrial-aquatic interfaces: river corridors, riparian and tidal wetlands, etc. In addition, these pulses can also transport microorganisms capable of driving biogeochemistry (Kominoski et al. 2020). However, these responses exist within time domains that are poorly understood and not constrained in coupled biogeochemical or Earth system models (Ward et al. 2020).
The aim of this workshop is to push forward our knowledge of extreme weather and fire effects on coastal carbon cycling. This OCB Scoping Workshop will bring together a diverse group of scientists to build a community of monitors/observers, experimentalists, and modelers to address these challenging knowledge gaps across these spatial and temporal domains.
The following conceptual questions serve as a framework to achieve the workshop’s goal:
Dates: October 23-26, 2022 at North Carolina State Univ. in Raleigh, NC (in person)
Organizing Subteams
Storms - Chris Osburn (lead), Hans Paerl, Karl Kaiser
Fires - Kelsey Bisson (lead), Sasha Kramer, Alan Roebuck, Joey Crosswell
Ecosystems - John Kominoski (lead), Elliott White, Tom Bianchi
Modeling – Dana Hunt (lead), Dulci Avouris, Joey Crosswell