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Abstract The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) provides over 180 distinct data products from 81 sites (47 terrestrial and 34 freshwater aquatic sites) within the United States and Puerto Rico. These data products include both field and remote sensing data collected using standardized protocols and sampling schema, with centralized quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) provided by NEON staff. Such breadth of data creates opportunities for the research community to extend basic and applied research while also extending the impact and reach of NEON data through the creation of derived data products—higher level data products derived by the user community from NEON data. Derived data products are curated, documented, reproducibly‐generated datasets created by applying various processing steps to one or more lower level data products—including interpolation, extrapolation, integration, statistical analysis, modeling, or transformations. Derived data products directly benefit the research community and increase the impact of NEON data by broadening the size and diversity of the user base, decreasing the time and effort needed for working with NEON data, providing primary research foci through the development via the derivation process, and helping users address multidisciplinary questions. Creating derived data products also promotes personal career advancement to those involved through publications, citations, and future grant proposals. However, the creation of derived data products is a nontrivial task. Here we provide an overview of the process of creating derived data products while outlining the advantages, challenges, and major considerations. 

This dataset contains estimates of gas exchange velocity, gas exchange rate, and hydraulic parameters for streams calculated from tracer-gas experiments and conservative tracer injections collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). All input data were collected by NEON and is available on the NEON data portal at https://data.neonscience.org. Specifically, the NEON Reaeration field and lab collection data product (DP1.20190.001) was used to calculate these estimates. Gas exchange was estimated in two ways: first, following an unpooled frequentist approach and second, following a partially pooled Bayesian approach. In addition, a salt-correction was applied to gas exchange estimates for sites where it was possible and necessary. All estimates of gas exchange are included in the file gasExchange_ds.csv. A recommended selection of these estimates is included in the dataset (best_k600_mPerDay and best_K600_mPerDay). The stanfit objects used for the partially pooled Bayesian approach are also included as site-specific model objects for gas exchange velocities and rates. In addition, water velocity was calculated from conservative tracer injections, and mean water depth was calculated from these water velocity estimates and measurements of wetted width and water discharge. All hydraulic parameters are included in the file hydraulics_ds.csv. All processing code is available in the reaRates R package. NEON is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated under cooperative agreement by Battelle. This material is based in part upon work supported by NSF through the NEON Program. 

Abstract. Air–water gas exchange is essential to understanding and quantifying many biogeochemical processes in streams and rivers, including greenhouse gas emissions and metabolism. Gas exchange depends on two factors, which are often quantified separately: (1) the air–water concentration gradient of the gas and (2) the gas exchange velocity.  There are fewer measurements of gas exchange velocity compared to concentrations in streams and rivers, which limits accurate characterization of air–water gas exchange (i.e., flux rates). The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) conducts SF6 gas-loss experiments in 22 of their 24 wadeable streams using standardized methods across all experiments and sites, and publishes raw concentration data from these experiments on the NEON data portal. NEON also conducts NaCl injections that can be used to characterize hydraulic geometry at all 24 wadeable streams. These NaCl injections are conducted both as part of the gas-loss experiments and separately. Here, we use these data to estimate gas exchange and water velocity using the reaRate R package. The dataset presented includes estimates of hydraulic parameters, cleaned raw concentration SF6 tracer-gas data (including removing outliers and failed experiments), estimated SF6 gas-loss rates, normalized gas exchange velocities (k600; m d−1) and normalized depth-dependent gas exchange rates (K600; d−1). This dataset provides one of the largest compilations of gas-loss experiments (n=339) in streams to date. This dataset is unique in that it contains gas exchange estimates from repeated experiments in geographically diverse streams across a range of discharges. In addition, this dataset contains information on the hydraulic geometry of all 24 NEON wadeable streams, which will support future research using NEON aquatic data. This dataset is a valuable resource that can be used to explore both within- and across-reach variability in the hydraulic geometry and gas exchange velocity in streams. The data are available at https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/18dcc1871ee71cf0b69f2ee4082839d0 (Aho et al., 2024), and the reaRate R package code is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12786089 (Cawley et al., 2024). 

The magnitude of stream and river carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emission is affected by seasonal changes in watershed biogeochemistry and hydrology. Global estimates of this flux are, however, uncertain, relying on calculated values for CO 2 and lacking spatial accuracy or seasonal variations critical for understanding macroecosystem controls of the flux. Here, we compiled 5,910 direct measurements of fluvial CO 2 partial pressure and modeled them against watershed properties to resolve reach-scale monthly variations of the flux. The direct measurements were then combined with seasonally resolved gas transfer velocity and river surface area estimates from a recent global hydrography dataset to constrain the flux at the monthly scale. Globally, fluvial CO 2 emission varies between 112 and 209 Tg of carbon per month. The monthly flux varies much more in Arctic and northern temperate rivers than in tropical and southern temperate rivers (coefficient of variation: 46 to 95 vs. 6 to 12%). Annual fluvial CO 2 emission to terrestrial gross primary production (GPP) ratio is highly variable across regions, ranging from negligible (<0.2%) to 18%. Nonlinear regressions suggest a saturating increase in GPP and a nonsaturating, steeper increase in fluvial CO 2 emission with discharge across regions, which leads to higher percentages of GPP being shunted into rivers for evasion in wetter regions. This highlights the importance of hydrology, in particular water throughput, in routing terrestrial carbon to the atmosphere via the global drainage networks. Our results suggest the need to account for the differential hydrological responses of terrestrial–atmospheric vs. fluvial–atmospheric carbon exchanges in plumbing the terrestrial carbon budget. 

Abstract Streams and rivers are major sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to the atmosphere, as carbon and nitrogen are converted and outgassed during transport. Although our understanding of drivers of individual GHG fluxes has improved with numerous site‐specific studies and global‐scale compilations, our ability to parse out interrelated physical and biogeochemical drivers of gas concentrations is limited by a lack of consistently collected, temporally continuous samples of GHGs and their associated drivers. We present a first analysis of such a dataset collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network across 27 streams and rivers across ecoclimatic domains of the United States. Average concentrations of CO₂ranged from 36.9 ± 0.88 to 404 ± 33 μmol L⁻¹, CH₄from 0.003 ± 0.0003 to 4.99 ± 0.72 μmol L⁻¹, and N₂O from 0.015 to 0.04 μmol L⁻¹and spanned ranges of previous global compilations. Both CO₂and CH₄were strongly affected by physical drivers including mean air temperature and stream slope, as well as by dissolved oxygen and total nitrogen concentrations. N₂O was exclusively correlated with total nitrogen concentrations. Results suggested that potential for gas exchange dominated patterns in gas concentrations at the site level, but contributions of in‐stream aerobic and anaerobic metabolism, and groundwater also likely varied across sites. The highest gas concentrations as well as highest variability occurred in low‐gradient, warmer, and nonperennial systems. These results are a first step in providing unprecedented, continuous estimates of GHG flux constrained by temporally variable physical and biogeochemical drivers of GHG production. 

Abstract Sunlight can oxidize dissolved organic carbon (DOC) to dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) in freshwaters. The importance of complete photooxidation, or photomineralization, as a sink for DOC remains unclear in temperate rivers, as most estimates are restricted to lakes, high latitude rivers, and coastal river plumes. In this study, we construct a model representing over 75,000 river reaches in the Connecticut River Watershed (CRW), USA, to calculate spectrally resolved photomineralization. We test the hypothesis that photomineralization is a negligible DOC sink across all reaches and flow conditions relative to DOC fluxes. Our model quantifies reaction rates and transport drivers within the river reaches for the ranges of flow conditions, incoming solar irradiance, and canopy cover shading observed throughout the year. Our model predicts average daily areal photomineralization rates ranging from 1.16 mg‐C m⁻² day⁻¹in low flow river reaches in the winter, to 18.33 mg‐C m⁻² day⁻¹in high flow river reaches during the summer. Even for high photomineralization fluxes, corresponding photomineralization uptake velocities are typically at least an order of magnitude smaller than those reported for other instream processes. We calculate DOC elimination by photomineralization relative to DOC fluxes through individual stream reaches as well as the entire riverine portion of the CRW. We find that relative photomineralization fluxes are highest in summer drought conditions in low order streams. In median flows and mean light intensities, for an average watershed travel distance, 3%–5% of the DOC fluxes are eliminated, indicating that photomineralization is a minor DOC sink in temperate rivers.