Hydrology, Ecology, and Nutrient Biogeochemistry at the Terrestrial-Aquatic Interface

Terrestrial-aquatic interfaces (TAI) play an important role in mediating the exchange of water and chemicals between land and subsurface and surface water systems, impacting biogeochemical transformations and influencing water quality and ecosystem health. Hydrologic exchange and the associated biogeochemical processes show significant spatiotemporal variability as the TAIs are subject to dynamic forcing over a wide range of timescales. Understanding and predicting the interactions between the hydrologic, ecologic, and biogeochemical processes at those interfaces is crucial for the sustainable management of water resources and promotion of healthy ecosystems under different environmental stresses and disturbances including climate change, human activities, and more frequent occurrence of extreme events. Both process-based and data-driven approaches have emerged to address critical challenges at TAIs as integral parts of the Earth system.

The main aim of this Research Topic is to advance the understanding of the process of coupled hydrologic, ecologic, and biogeochemical processes along various terrestrial-aquatic interfaces from the summit to sea, e.g., river corridors and coastal systems, through integrated modeling and monitoring efforts.

We invite observational, experimental, theoretical, analytical, numerical, and data-driven research and contributions that cover the following topics:

a) Understanding hydro-biogeochemical processes such as redox dynamics and biogeochemical transformations of carbon, nutrients, and metals occurring at the TAIs.
b) Addressing TAI biogeochemical heterogeneity and scaling.
c) Disentangling the interactions among hydrologic, ecologic, and biogeochemical processes.
d) Identifying and characterizing geomorphological features and processes affecting exchanges across TAIs.
e) Characterizing and quantifying the propagation of uncertainty from various sources to predictions of system functions.

This Research Topic is linked to the Topic Editors conference session at the Goldschmidt Conference 2022

Keywords: biogeochemistry, nutrient cycling, terrestrial-aquatic interfaces, coastal interfaces, freshwater, river corridors, watershed function, model-data integration, disturbances, water quality, machine learning, artificial intelligence, hydrologic, ecologic, biogeochemical processes

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.