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Abstract The processes and biomass that characterize any ecosystem are fundamentally constrained by the total amount of energy that is either fixed within or delivered across its boundaries. Ultimately, ecosystems may be understood and classified by their rates of total and net productivity and by the seasonal patterns of photosynthesis and respiration. Such understanding is well developed for terrestrial and lentic ecosystems but our understanding of ecosystem phenology has lagged well behind for rivers. The proliferation of reliable and inexpensive sensors for monitoring dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide is underpinning a revolution in our understanding of the ecosystem energetics of rivers. Here, we synthesize...
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The collection of organisms in stream ecosystems all contribute to a stream's metabolism. We seek to understand how the rates and patterns of metabolism vary within and across streams. Current efforts include data collection and synthesis for streams across the US. We hope to foster a global effort to harness new and inexpensive sensor technologies to measure the pulse of streams all over the planet.
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While it is widely recognized that microorganisms are intimately linked with every biogeochemical cycle in all ecosystems, it is not clear how and when microbial dynamics constrain ecosystem processes. As a result, it is know clear how to apply the value of increasingly detailed characterization of microbial properties to our understanding of ecosystem ecology. Several recent papers have demonstrated how information about microbial dynamics can be incorporated into ecosystem models (Allison et al. 2010, McGuire and Treseder 2010, Todd - Brown et al. 2011a), but it is generally not clear what types of microbial data are most useful in explaining variation in biogeochemical processes and ecosystem functioning, especially...
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A major goal of microbial ecology is to identify links between microbial community structure and microbial processes. Although this objective seems straight forward, there are conceptual and methodological challenges to designing studies that explicitly evaluate this link. Here, we analyzed literature documenting structure and process responses to manipulations to determine the frequency of structure-process links and whether experimental approaches and techniques influence link detection. We examined nine journals (published 2009-13) and retained 148 experimental studies measuring microbial community structure and processes. Many qualifying papers (112 of 148) documented structure and process responses, but few...
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Streams and rivers have a limited spatial extent, but are increasingly recognized as key components of regional biogeochemical cycles. The collective metabolic processing of organisms, known as ecosystem metabolism, is centrally important to nutrient cycling and carbon fluxes in these environments, but is poorly integrated into emerging biogeochemical concepts. This line of inquiry lags behind other aspects of regional biogeochemistry because of the lack of long-term, regionally-diverse studies of stream metabolism. With a few exceptions, metabolism studies have focused on small headwater catchments using short-term (days to weeks) observation. As a consequence, basic patterns and controls of this fundamental process,...
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