Within Pond Variations of Gas Fluxes and the Spatio-temporal Variations of Benthic Algae and Limnological Characteristics in Shallow Ponds Located in the Hudson Bay Lowlands (HBL), near Churchill, Manitoba

The enhanced warming in the Subarctic is thawing the permafrost in the Hudson Bay Lowlands (HBL), making the peatlands carbon sources to the atmosphere. In the HBL, studies have observed that the shallow aquatic systems are sequesters of carbon. In this study, we observed that temperature is a significant variable in determining respiration rates from extracted pond sediment cores that were manipulated in incubation experiments. In the ponds that were studied, Strange Pond had an average sequestration or net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of -0.71 mol/m2/s and the average oxygen production was 1.03 mol/m2/s. The ponds were benthically driven cyanobacteria and was responsible for the processing of autochthonous carbon in the system. It was found that as the area of the pond becomes smaller, the spatial location of pond water and benthos sampling is of minor importance in characterizing the pond as a whole.