Carbon dioxide and methane emissions of Swedish low-order streams—a national estimate and lessons learnt from more than a decade of observations

Abstract

Low-order streams are suggested to dominate the atmospheric CO2 source of all inland waters. Yet, many large-scale stream estimates suffer from methods not designed for gas emission determination and rarely include other greenhouse gases such as CH4. Here, we present a compilation of directly measured CO2 and CH4 concentration data from Swedish low-order streams (> 1600 observations across > 500 streams) covering large climatological and land-use gradients. These data were combined with an empirically derived gas transfer model and the characteristics of a ca. 400,000 km stream network covering the entire country. The total stream CO2 and CH4 emission corresponded to 2.7 Tg C yr−1 (95% confidence interval: 2.0–3.7) of which the CH4 accounted for 0.7% (0.02 Tg C yr−1). The study highlights the importance of low-order streams, as well as the critical need to better represent variability in emissions and stream areal extent to constrain future stream C emission estimates.