Mathematical Biology Seminar Alice Carter, Utah State University, Tuesday, April 15, 2025 2:00pm in LCB 215 Linking carbon fluxes and carbon stocks in stream ecosystems to predict their metabolic response to climate change. Abstract: Stream ecosystems contribute significantly to global carbon cycling. Measurements of stream metabolism (primary productivity and respiration) have proliferated over the last decade, greatly increasing our understanding of the dynamics of these fluxes in space. However, two major challenges remain: 1) few long-term observations of stream metabolism exist, limiting our understanding of how this flux is shifting in response to climate change and 2) metabolism, which is relatively easy to measure at scale, estimates carbon fluxes into and out of the ecosystem, but it is rarely tied to the much harder to measure pools of carbon in the stream. Linking carbon fluxes to carbon pools will be essential in predicting how ecosystems will respond to climate change. In is talk, I use Bayesian time series models to estimate underlying carbon stocks in a river based on the metabolism and then test the model's ability to hindcast to the oldest measurement of annual stream metabolism, collected in 1970. I share the implications and next steps for this modeling approach.