The carbon footprint of hydroelectric reservoirs and inland waters in Québec

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The proposed research program combines the need to develop detailed carbon budgets for specific reservoirs, in order to quantify the C footprint associated to hydroelectric generation and to understand the underlying processes, with a broader perspective that places hydroelectric development as a landscape alteration that fundamentally modifies the biogeochemical functioning of aquatic networks and therefore alters the regional C balance in the boreal biome of Québec. In order to address these two complementary but conceptually and practically distinct issues, the proposed CRD program, in partnership with Hydro Québec (HQ), is divided into four components: 1) The determination of the C footprint of the newly-created La Romaine hydroelectric development, as a unique case study of a reservoir cascade complex. 2) The determination of the C footprint (sinks and sources) for the ensemble of inland waters (lakes and rivers) of boreal Québec, and how this footprint may shift under future scenarios of climate and environmental change. This component represents the necessary first step in order to integrate reservoirs within a network perspective at the whole landscape scale. 3) Modeling reservoir emissions based on reservoir age, location and local features based on a combination new measurements from reservoirs across the territory and existing long-term data sets. 4) Determining the current GHG emissions of the ensemble of reservoirs located in boreal Québec, and deriving a first order estimate of how hydroelectric development may have altered the aquatic C footprint at the regional scale, and how this C footprint may shift regionally with time, under future scenarios of climate and environmental change. The proposed research builds on 15 years of fruitful collaboration with HQ, and will yield concrete tools for the inclusion of reservoir emissions within C accounting frameworks, which are of key strategic and economic importance for industry and government alike, while yielding fundamental new insight on the role of inland waters on regional C balances in the boreal biome, and on how landscape transformations mediated by impoundment influence the biogeochemical functioning of these boreal aquatic networks.