Biological and Environmental Science Seminar 2.4.2026

Sediments of inland waters are known to act as loci for accumulation of organic matter and may thus serve as important carbon stores and carbon sinks on the landscape scale. However, inland waters are currently not taken into account in national scale Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) carbon accounting, hence the magnitude of carbon accumulation in these systems is poorly constrained. The 3-year BlueLakes project quantified carbon stocks and accumulation rates in over 200 lakes in Finland, including intensive study of three large lakes where shoreline vegetated areas were included in the assessment. Furthermore, the project added a carbon cycle module to the national catchment discharge and nutrient loading model WSFS-VEMALA. Here I will briefly summarize the project results and their implications for understanding the role of inland waters in landscape-scale carbon flows.

Tom Jilbert is Professor of Environmental Geochemistry at University of Helsinki. He is specialized in sediment biogeochemistry and has studied carbon, nutrient and trace metal dynamics in freshwater and marine sedimentary settings. He leads a research group at the Department of Geosciences and Geography and was co-PI of the BlueLakes project (2023-2025).