With funding from the National Center for Ecological Assessment and Synthesis (NCEAS), Cary Institute researchers Drs. Nina Caraco and Jon Cole have been investigating the role that inland waters play in regional to global carbon budgets. The project involves a collaboration with a group international scientists, including Dr. Yves Prairie (Canada), Dr. Carlos Duarte (Spain), Dr. Pirkko Kortelainen (Finland), Dr. John Downing (USA), Dr. Lars Tranvik (Sweden), Dr. Bill McDowell (USA), Dr. Robert Striegl (USA), Dr. Jack Middelburg (Netherlands) and Dr. John Melack (USA). Because inland waters occupy a very small area of the planet, these systems have been largely ignored in studies of the carbon balance at the global or large regional scales. Our group demonstrated, based on a synthesis of the available data, that inland waters are, in fact, critical for a reliable estimation of carbon movements and fates at a global scale. While the oceans and terrestrial forests are responsible for the net uptake of atmospheric CO₂, freshwater ecosystems process a large amount of terrestrially-derived primary production and alter, significantly, the balance between C sequestration and net CO₂ release on the continents. A paper in the journal Ecosystems (Cole et al. 2007) shows about half of all of terrestrial Net Ecosystem Production is either stored, oxidized and released to the atmosphere, or transported to the ocean by inland waters. A number of publications and presentations from this work are listed on the NCEAS web site at www.nceas.ucsb.edu/projects/6500