DEEP-C

DEEP-C will establish a national programme for systematically collecting long-term observational data on the mechanistic cycles of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon dynamics within lakes at 40 study sites. These data will be unprecedented in their level of detail, consistency, and quality. The project will also engage in a complementary synthesis of existing data. Using dated sediment records, DEEP-C will reconstruct patterns of carbon burial, climatic conditions, and land use over the last 150 years. At 15 sites, these reconstruction efforts will go back as far as the mid-Holocene (5,000 years BP) and thus shed light on how anthropogenic forces have disrupted the carbon cycle in this earlier period of human history, one that is rarely considered during this type of research.
These data will be used in the ORCHIDEE-C_lateral land surface model to explore the carbon cycle within the terrestrial biosphere and the dynamics of biospheric carbon in lakes.

A new process-based model will be constructed and coupled with ORCHIDEE-C_lateral. Using the project’s database, this model will simulate how carbon burial in lake sediments and GHG emissions are influenced by climatic conditions and lake watershed processes.
The model will first be used to better limit current large-scale GHG emissions from lakes and to parse out the anthropogenically induced perturbations from the natural variability in these fluxes. The resulting estimates will clarify the percentage of lake GHG emissions that result from anthropogenic causes. These models will help reconstruct the changes in lake GHG levels and watershed carbon balances that have taken place since the mid-Holocene.

Simulations will first be carried out at the scales of France and Europe. By establishing international partnerships, it will become possible to gather data for other biomes and thus run simulations at a planetary scale.

Coordinator: Jean-Philippe Jenny, INRAE

Funding: €1,496,073 for 60 months