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5/21/2019  |   10:00 AM - 10:15 AM   |  PERSISTENT LATERAL NITROGEN LOSS TEN YEARS AFTER TUNDRA WILDFIRE   |  254 B

PERSISTENT LATERAL NITROGEN LOSS TEN YEARS AFTER TUNDRA WILDFIRE

Climate change is triggering widespread ecosystem disturbance across the permafrost zone, including rapidly increased incidence of tundra wildfire.Wildfire extent and intensity have, with unknown consequences for Arctic terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem biogeochemistry, as wildfire may cause terrestrial vegetation shifts, increasing productivity and nutrient demand; alternatively, wildfire regimes may intensify lateral nutrient loss from the landscapes into adjacent river networks. To address this unknown, we used the river network as a sensor, collecting water samples from 60 burned and unburned watersheds around the Anaktuvuk River fire scar in northern Alaska. We used a novel aerial sampling technique to collect samples three times during the flow seasons of 2017 and 2018, ten years after the wildfire. Despite a decade of ecosystem recovery, we observed nearly a doubling of total dissolved nitrogen concentration, primarily due to elevated organic nitrogen and secondarily from inorganic nitrogen increases. Isotopic analysis suggests that burn-mobilized lateral nitrogen flux comes from old soil nitrogen, not newly-fixed inputs from vegetation shifts. These findings indicate that tundra wildfire could destabilize nitrogen previously stored in permafrost, potentially exacerbating terrestrial nitrogen limitation and altering aquatic and estuarine ecosystems in the permafrost zone.

  • ClimateChange
  • Nitrogen
  • Polar Regions

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Presenters/Authors

Benjamin Abbott (), Brigham Young University, Department of Plant and Wildlife Sciences, benabbott@byu.edu;


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William Breck Bowden (), University of Vermont, breck.bowden@uvm.edu;


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Samuel Bratsman (), Brigham Young University, Department of Plant and Wildlife Sciences, sbratsmanx@gmail.com;


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Greg Carling (), Brigham Young University, greg.carling@byu.edu;


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Rebecca Frei (), Brigham Young University, Department of Plant and Wildlife Sciences, beccafrei@gmail.com;


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Frances Iannucci (), University of Alaska Fairbanks, fiannucci@alaska.edu;


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Ludda Ludwig (), University of Alaska Fairbanks, ludda.ludwig@gmail.com;


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Adrian Rocha` (), University of Notre Dame, arocha1@nd.edu;


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Arial Shogren (), Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Michigan State University, shogrena@msu.edu;


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Rachel Watts (), Brigham Young University, Department of Plant and Wildlife Sciences, miss.rachelwatts64@gmail.com;


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Jay Zarnetske (), Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Michigan State University, jpz@msu.edu;


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