The role of freshwater phytoplankton in the global carbon cycle

Sammanfattning: Water flowing through the landscape transports chemical substances including carbon. Along the way from upland soils to the ocean, carbon is transformed from organic carbon into inorganic carbon and vice versa. One such carbon transformation process is the uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the water phase by phytoplankton. For some inland waters, it has been shown that phytoplankton can significantly reduce the amount of CO2 (measured as partial pressure of CO2, pCO2) in the water phase. However, the importance of this process for carbon budgets on a regional and global scale is not yet known.The aim of this thesis was to investigate the importance of CO2 uptake by phytoplankton for CO2 dynamics in lakes and rivers on a regional and global scale, and to explain its spatial variation. Conceptual models and the analysis of monitoring data together with statistical modeling and meta-analyses were used.Combining a conceptual lake model for carbon transformation with a mass balance approach showed that gross primary production in lakes is an important flux in the global dissolved inorganic carbon budget of inland waters. In a next step, a simple proxy to assess the phytoplankton influence on the pCO2 in individual lakes and rivers was tested and applied on a regional and global scale. The analysis showed that a significant pCO2 reduction by phytoplankton could be expected in about 20% to 40% of lakes in the temperate and sub-/tropical region. In 9% of the Swedish lakes analyzed, the proxy indicated a significant pCO2 reduction by phytoplankton during summer. The pCO2 can also be significantly reduced by phytoplankton in rivers, and such a reduction might occur in about 20% of the temperate rivers on Earth. In a temperate river that was studied in more detail, consecutive impoundments were found to stimulate phytoplankton production, which might be one explanation for a greater phytoplankton influence on the pCO2 in such systems.Taken together, these results suggest that CO2 uptake by phytoplankton is a significant flux in the global CO2 budget of inland waters. The importance of CO2 uptake by phytoplankton for CO2 dynamics in individual lakes and rivers was predictable by easily available water physico-chemical and biological variables and varied widely in relation to environmental conditions.