1,2,6,1,2- 1Département des sciences de l’environnement, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, QC, Canada (muhammad.farhan.ul.moazzam@uqtr.ca)
- 2Centre d’études nordiques, Québec, QC, Canada
- 3Department of Physics & Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada
- 4GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany
- 5Département de géographie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
- 6Département de géographie Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Canada
Boreal forests play an important role in the global carbon (C) cycle, but carbon and energy fluxes are still poorly constrained because of complex disturbance histories and a limited number of observation stations throughout remote northern landscapes. The La Romaine watershed in Quebec has undergone extensive hydroelectric development, including dam construction and related land-cover changes. We aim to use a land surface model to quantify the impact of land cover changes from natural and anthropogenic disturbances on net ecosystem productivity (NEP), gross primary productivity (GPP), ecosystem respiration (ER), and latent heat flux. In the initial phase of this study, plant functional types (PFTs) were derived from ESA-CCI land-cover data and used to drive site-level simulations with the Canadian Land Surface Scheme Including Biogeochemical Cycles (CLASSIC) together with ERA5 reanalysis data.
The simulations produced daily time series of NEP, GPP, ER, and net latent heat flux, depicting typical boreal seasonality with strong summer season peaks and snow-dominated dormant seasons. GPP presents a pronounced rise in late spring, while high in mid-summer, but falloff in autumn, whereas ER trailed temperature closely, led to periods of reduced but non-zero C losses during the winter season. Moreover, NEP is characterized by comparatively short windows of net C uptake when photosynthesis surpasses respiration, with longer, milder spring and autumn transition periods and winters with near-neutral or net C loss, while latent heat flux varies with growing-season productivity and moisture availability, signifying a tight coupling between carbon uptake and evapotranspiration.
We show that satellite-derived PFTs with ERA5 reanalysis forcing enable process-based exploration of boreal C and energy dynamics in a remote hydropower complex, even in the absence of dense local measurements. Ongoing work will replace the ESA-CCI PFTs with high-resolution (Landsat 30m resolution), Romaine-specific LULC-derived PFTs and refine the forcing, paving the way to link simulated flux responses with the observation’s ones in the La Romaine watershed.
How to cite: Moazzam, M. F. U., Helbig, M., Talbot, J., Garneau, M., and Roy, A.: Simulating boreal carbon and energy fluxes in the La Romaine watershed with the CLASSIC land surface model, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-6069, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-6069, 2026.
