Modelling dissolved organic carbon (DOC) export for greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting in drained organic forest soils

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:The paper provides a practical modeling framework that balances accuracy and operational feasibility, serving as a template for integrating DOC export into broader GHG accounting models.

🏢実務担当者:National inventory agencies and forest managers can adopt this workflow to include DOC-related carbon losses in their reporting, using widely available meteorological and water quality data.

🏛政策担当者:The findings support updating IPCC emission factors for drained organic soils and highlight the importance of including DOC export in national climate mitigation strategies.

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) export from drained organic forest soils represents a substantial but still insufficiently operationalised pathway of carbon loss in greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting frameworks. Although DOC-derived downstream CO2 emissions are acknowledged in international guidelines, their routine inclusion in national inventories is constrained by data intensity and model complexity. This study presents a pragmatic, inventory-oriented modelling workflow designed to quantify DOC export and associated nutrient losses from drained organic soils using widely available meteorological, hydrological and spatial datasets. The approach combines Penman-Monteith based estimation of reference evapotranspiration with a simplified water-balance framework to derive monthly and annual run-off at the catchment or a field scale. DOC and nutrient exports can be calculated by coupling modelled run-off with measured monthly concentrations, allowing rapid updating as new water-quality data become available. The workflow was parametrised and tested using multi-year field datasets from hemiboreal drained peatland sites in Latvia, including forest stands, agricultural land and abandoned peat extraction areas monitored within the scope of LIFE OrgBalt and other projects. Results demonstrate pronounced differences in DOC export among land-use types, driven jointly by evapotranspiration control on run-off and land-use-specific DOC concentration. Annual DOC exports in drained organic forest soils were generally below the default emission factor from the 2013 IPCC Wetlands Supplement (0.31 t C·ha-1·yr-1), with the nationally derived factor for forest land (0.22 t C·ha-1·yr-1) approximately 30% lower. The method additionally yields nutrient export estimates relevant to water quality assessment: mean annual total nitrogen export across study sites was 15.52 ± 9.47 kg·ha-1·yr-1, indicating substantial losses from drained organic soils under forest land use. By deliberately avoiding data-intensive process-based carbon models, the proposed workflow fills the gap between detailed site studies and operational GHG accounting. It provides an implementable basis for integration DOC-related C losses and nutrient export into national inventories and drainage maintenance planning, thereby supporting both climate-mitigation reporting and evidence-based land and water management in drained organic soils.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.22616/erdev.2026.25.tf095first seen 2026-06-20 05:27:16