Organic carbon (OC) plays a fundamental role in the Earth’s climate system and biogeochemical cycles. Understanding the sources, transport, transformation, and fate of OC, as well as exchanges between dissolved and particulate phases, is critical for constraining regional and global carbon budgets, assessing carbon sequestration, and predicting ecosystem responses to natural and anthropogenic environmental change.

The land–ocean continuum, which encompasses rivers and coastal waters to continental margins and the deep ocean, provides important pathways for carbon transfer, transformation, and storage across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. During transport, biological, chemical, and physical processes, such as mineral-organic interactions and hydrodynamic transport, could profoundly alter the composition, reactivity, and age of OC, thereby influencing its preservation, redistribution, and ultimate burial. As a result, identifying carbon sources, quantifying carbon fluxes, assessing carbon burial efficiency, and constraining long-term carbon sequestration remain major challenges in understanding land-to-ocean carbon cycle research.

This session aims to bring together researchers investigating OC transport and cycling across the land–ocean continuum, from terrestrial and freshwater sources to coastal and marine sinks. We welcome observational, experimental, paleoenvironmental, and modelling studies addressing carbon sources, fluxes, transport pathways, transformation processes, preservation, burial, and sequestration in both particulate and dissolved forms. Contributions spanning the water column to the sedimentary record, including water sample, suspended particulate matter, sediment-trap observations, aquatic sediments, and sediment cores, are particularly encouraged. Remote sensing, autonomous observations, and numerical modelling approaches, either as standalone tools or integrated with field and laboratory studies, are likewise encouraged. We also welcome studies exploring the impacts of human activities and climate variability on carbon cycling across both modern and past environments.