
Until recently, our understanding of the global carbon cycle was largely limited to the world’s oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. Tom Battin, who heads EPFL’s River Ecosystems Laboratory (RIVER), has now shed new light on the key role that river networks play in our changing world. These findings are outlined in a review article commissioned by Nature.
Battin, a full professor at EPFL’s School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), persuaded a dozen experts in the field to contribute to the article. For the first time, their research combines the most recent data to demonstrate the critical importance of river ecosystems for global carbon fluxes - integrating land, atmosphere and the oceans.
Calculating carbon fluxes

Their findings point to a clear link between river ecosystem metabolism and the global carbon cycle. While routing water toward the oceans, river ecosystem metabolism consumes organic carbon derived from terrestrial ecosystems, which produces CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. Residual organic carbon that is not metabolized makes its way into the oceans, together with CO2 that is not emitted into the atmosphere. These riverine inputs of carbon can influence the biogeochemistry of the coastal waters.
Battin and his colleagues also discuss how global change, particularly climate change, urbanization, land use change and flow regulation, including dams, affect river ecosystem metabolism and related greenhouse gas fluxes. For instance, rivers that drain agricultural lands receive massive amounts of nitrogen from fertilizers. Elevated nitrogen concentrations, coupled with rising temperatures owing to global warming, can cause eutrophication - a process that leads to the formation of algal blooms. As these algae die, they stimulate the production of methane and nitrous oxide, greenhouse gases that are even more potent than CO2. Dams can also exacerbate eutrophication, potentially leading to even higher greenhouse gas emissions.

The authors conclude their article by underlining the necessity for a global River Observing System (RIOS) to better quantify and predict the role of rivers for the global carbon cycle. RIOS will integrate data from sensors networks in the rivers and satellite imagery with mathematical models to generate near-real time carbon fluxes related to river ecosystem metabolism. "Thereby, RIOS would serve as a diagnostic tool, allowing us to ’take the pulse’ of river ecosystems and respond to human disturbances," says Battin. "River networks are comparable to our vascular systems that we monitor for health purposes. It is time now to monitor the health of the world’s river networks’. The message couldn’t be clearer.
References
Tom Battin, Ronny Lauerwald, Emily S. Bernhardt, Enrico Bertuzzo, Lluís Gómez Gener, Robert O. Hall, Jr., Erin R. Hotchkiss, Taylor Maavara, Tamlin M. Pavelsky, Lishan Ran, Peter Raymond, Judith A. Rosentreter, and Pierre Regnier. "River ecosystem metabolism and carbon biogeochemistry in a changing world," Nature, 18 January 2023.