Are you an early career scientist who would like to share your research on carbon in deltas with the Leaky Deltas community?
The Leaky Deltas scoping workshop will focus on deltaic systems to build a network of modelers, experimentalists, and field scientists working on deltas in this era of unprecedented climate change and other anthropogenic stresses. Despite the importance of deltas and blue carbon ecosystems to the global carbon cycle and coastal communities, land-to-ocean parameterizations in Earth System models are highly simplified and do not mechanistically include many of the processes involved in cycling carbon in these areas. Leaky Deltas aims to bring together a diverse group who are committed to exploring the physical, temporal, and biogeochemical processes that modulate fluxes of carbon to and from global deltas through a series of webinars leading up to a workshop to be held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on March 17-20, 2025. For more information, please visit our website at https://www.us-ocb.org/leaky-deltas-workshop-2025/.
If you would like to share your work in our webinar series, please apply to give a presentation in our January webinar. We seek graduate students and early career scientists (within 4 years of PhD) to give 12-minute talks, with time for questions.
Past webinars
October 24: Robert Twilley (LSU) and Marc Simard (NASA JPL)
September 26: Muriel Bruckner (LSU) and Anastasia Pillouras (PSU)
May 30: Bob Aller
April 18: Bin Zhao and Thomas Bianchi
March 14: Christophe Rabouille
River deltas and the adjacent coastal ocean are critical interfaces between terrestrial and oceanic environments. Deltas are the entry point of ~50% of the fresh water and 40% of all global particulate matter entering the ocean. They are major centers for particulate and dissolved organic carbon net transfer from land to ocean.
Recent evidence suggests that coastal oceans have become net sink for atmospheric CO2 during post-industrial times and continued human pressures in coastal zones and alterations to deltas will likely have an important impact on the future evolution of the coastal ocean’s carbon budget.
Despite the importance of deltas and blue carbon ecosystems to the global carbon cycle and coastal communities, land-to-ocean parameterizations in Earth System models are highly simplified and do not mechanistically include many of the processes involved in cycling carbon in these areas.
Significant and critical knowledge gaps on processes, their impacts on marine biogeochemistry, and the direction of future change exist—this workshop aims to address those knowledge gaps.
We will bring together a diverse group who are committed to exploring the physical, temporal, and biogeochemical processes that modulate fluxes of carbon to and from global deltas. We will bolster community engagement and participation, with a particular emphasis on inclusion of minoritized populations, international partners, and state and federal U.S agencies through targeted activities, before, during, and after the workshop.
This scoping workshop will utilize momentum from the OCB 2023 Summer Workshop plenary session focused on deltaic systems to build a network of modelers, experimentalists, and field scientists working on deltas in this era of unprecedented climate change and other anthropogenic stresses, and will address and advance several OCB mission-specific topics:
Shaily Rahman (UC Boulder)
Kanchan Maiti (LSU)
Jaap Nienhuis (Utrecht University)
Cristina Schultz (Northeastern University)
Elizabeth Chamberlain (Wageningen University)
Julia Moriarty (CU Boulder)
Marisa Repasch (University of New Mexico)
WORKSHOP TOPICS
Ocean biogeochemistry – Influence of delta systems on adjacent coastal ocean in terms of carbon cycle (DIC/ALK/pCO2) both in water column and sediment, carbon burial and lateral transport of carbon.
Ecosystems – Role of salt marshes, mangroves, and sea grass on carbon retention and burial in delta plain and net export to adjacent ocean; reconstructions and forecasts of the distribution of these coastal ecosystems.
Novel methods and integration – Employing new technologies, e.g., chronology, remote sensing, to reconstruct and monitor delta change; integrating field and model data to study processes and change across timescales (past, present, and future).
Connectivity – Variability in hydrological connectivity across delta plain and delta shelf and its impact on carbon consumption, transport and retention.
Perturbations – Impact of climate and human driven changes including extreme events on delta carbon cycling.
Biogeochemical modeling: including mechanistic understanding of carbon cycling in the land-to-ocean continuum in global models, parameterizations of blue carbon ecosystems in high-resolution ocean models, quantifying organic and inorganic carbon transfers from deltas to theocean.
Community consensus Topic #1 and Topic # 2 – TBD
PRE-WORKSHOP
Objectives
Activities
DEI + ECR FOCUS
In the pre-workshop activities we will invite speakers from different continents and include in our discussions the different location-based needs from different communities (global representation). We will offer support on presentation delivery, design, and practice sessions to non-native English and early-career speakers before the actual online events, as a form of professional development.
OUTCOMES
The workshop aims to develop knowledge and define future research needs on the role of deltas in the global carbon cycle—while building an interdisciplinary community (with a focus on ECR and underrepresented minoritized scientists)—around this understudied yet critical aspect of ocean biochemistry. To distribute these outcomes to the broader community there will be a consensus paper, a global delta carbon budget infographic, and an AGU Eos piece.
PROPOSED WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
| DAY 0: Arrival, check-in, poster set-up Evening mixer: Welcome attendees, brief workshop introduction, goals, expectations, code of conduct |
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| Morning – breakfast provided | Afternoon - lunch provided | Evening | |
| DAY 1 | Welcome & open the workshop Plenaries Lightning Talks | Breakout groups (identifying unresolved scientific questions) Report out + discussion Excursion to the LSU Center for River Studies (build comradery & gain inspiration) | Dinner and networking reception |
| DAY 2 | Plenaries Lightning Talks Poster session | 2 Breakout/working groups (assigned) to consider knowledge gaps identified on Day 1 Report out + discussion | Dinner in groups –self organize |
| DAY 3 | 1 Plenary Breakout groups: work on identified deliverables | Breakout groups work on deliverables Breakout groups: brainstorm ways to increase community participation Evaluate: was community consensus achieved during the workshop? Adjourn ~4PM | |
Role of deltaic sediments in regulating biogeochemical cycles (Chairs: Shaily Rahman, Jessica Luo, Cristina Schultz)
OCB2023 PLENARY SESSION TALKS (recorded June 2023)
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Funding for the Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry Project Office is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The OCB Project Office is housed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.