We were joined by Elke Eichelmann from the School of Biology and Environmental Science, who discussed her work on water and carbon exchange in flooded ecosystems. Evapotranspiration is the combined water loss from terrestrial ecosystems via transpiration, water lost by plants during the process of carbon assimilation, and evaporation, water lost via direct evaporation of soil and surface water. Despite its importance to the global water cycle we currently struggle to reliably predict evapotranspiration and how it will evolve with climate change, especially in flooded ecosystems like wetlands. Wetlands and peatlands have been recognized for their important contributions to the global carbon cycle, but we also need to understand the water-carbon trade-off in these unique ecosystems to help us predict how the water cycle will respond to climate change.

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