Chanca, Ingrid and Trumbore, Susan and Macario, Kita and Sierra, Carlos
(2022).
Probability Distributions of Radiocarbon in Open Linear Compartmental Systems at Steady-State.
Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. 127
:3
, e2021JG006673
[Research article]
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Abstract
Radiocarbon (C-14) is commonly used as a tracer of the carbon cycle to determine how fast carbon moves between different reservoirs such as plants, soils, rivers, or oceans. However such studies mostly emphasize the mean value (as Delta C-14) of an unknown probability distribution. We introduce a novel algorithm to compute Delta C-14 distributions from knowledge of the age distribution of carbon in linear compartmental systems at steady-state. Our results demonstrate that the shape of the distributions might differ according to the speed of cycling of ecosystem compartments and their connectivity within the system, and might contain multiple peaks and long tails. The distributions are also sensitive to the variations of Delta C-14 in the atmosphere over time, as influenced by the counteracting anthropogenic effects of fossil-fuel emissions (C-14-free) and nuclear weapons testing (excess C-14). Lastly, we discuss insights that such distributions can offer for sampling and design of experiments aiming to capture the precise variance of Delta C-14 values present in the multi-compartmental ecosystems.
Authors/Creators: | Chanca, Ingrid and Trumbore, Susan and Macario, Kita and Sierra, Carlos | ||||||
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Title: | Probability Distributions of Radiocarbon in Open Linear Compartmental Systems at Steady-State | ||||||
Series Name/Journal: | Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences | ||||||
Year of publishing : | 2022 | ||||||
Volume: | 127 | ||||||
Number: | 3 | ||||||
Article number: | e2021JG006673 | ||||||
Number of Pages: | 23 | ||||||
Publisher: | AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION | ||||||
ISSN: | 2169-8953 | ||||||
Language: | English | ||||||
Publication Type: | Research article | ||||||
Article category: | Scientific peer reviewed | ||||||
Version: | Published version | ||||||
Copyright: | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 | ||||||
Full Text Status: | Public | ||||||
Subjects: | (A) Swedish standard research categories 2011 > 1 Natural sciences > 106 Biological Sciences (Medical to be 3 and Agricultural to be 4) > Ecology | ||||||
Keywords: | radiocarbon, open systems, pool models, carbon age, transit time, ecology | ||||||
URN:NBN: | urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-p-116746 | ||||||
Permanent URL: | http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-p-116746 | ||||||
Additional ID: |
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ID Code: | 27604 | ||||||
Faculty: | S - Faculty of Forest Sciences | ||||||
Department: | (NL, NJ) > Dept. of Ecology (S) > Dept. of Ecology | ||||||
Deposited By: | SLUpub Connector | ||||||
Deposited On: | 25 Apr 2022 08:25 | ||||||
Metadata Last Modified: | 25 Apr 2022 08:31 |
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