Jennifer Harden, PhD (Former Employee)

One of the main questions remaining for global science involves the cycle of carbon among the atmosphere, oceans, and land. Scientists are trying to better determine the amount of carbon stored in and transferred between these three locations. This task has become more complex because in recent decades the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere has increased due to the burning of...

To reconcile observations of decomposition rates, carbon inventories, and net primary production (NPP), we estimated long-term averages for C exchange in boreal forests near Thompson, Manitoba. Soil drainage as defined by water table, moss cover, and permafrost dynamics, is the dominant control on direct fire emissions. In upland forests, an average of about 10-30% of annual NPP was...

The conversion of land from its native state to an agricultural use commonly results in a significant loss of soil carbon (Mann, 1985; Davidson and Ackerman, 1993). Globally, this loss is estimated to account for as much as 1/3 of the net CO2 emissions for the period of 1850 to 1980 (Houghton et al, 1983). Roughly 20 to 40 percent of original soil carbon is estimated to be lost as CO2 as...

Three independent methods were used to measure net ecosystem production (NEP) in four wetlands near Thompson, Manitoba, Canada. The first method calculated NEP by subtracting heterotrophic respiration from net primary productivity, using both measurements and estimates derived from the literature. The second method used radiocarbon data from cores to derive long-term NEP averaged over...

Links between erosion/sedimentation history and soil carbon cycling were examined in a highly erosive setting in Mississippi loess soils. We sampled soils on (relatively) undisturbed and cropped hillslopes and measured C, N, 14C, and CO2 flux to characterize carbon storage and dynamics and to parameterize Century and spreadsheet 14C models for different erosion and tillage histories. For...

Understanding the carbon cycle is one of the most difficult challenges facing scientists who study the global environment. Lack of understanding of global carbon cycling is perhaps best illustrated by our inability to balance the present-day global CO2 budget. The amount of CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels and by deforestation appears to exceed the amount accumulating in the...