Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Abstract We show that sediment respiration is one of the key factors contributing to the high CO 2 supersaturation in and evasion from Finnish lakes, and evidently also over large areas in the boreal landscape, where the majority of the lakes are small and shallow. A subpopulation of 177 randomly selected lakes (100 km 2 ( Rantakari & Kortelainen, 2005 ) was 42 g C m −2 LA (lake area), approximately 20% of the average annual C accumulation in Finnish forest soils and tree biomass (covering 51% of the total area of Finland) in the 1990s. Extrapolating our estimate from Finland to all lakes of the boreal region suggests a total annual CO 2 evasion of about 50 TgC, a value upto 40% of current estimates for lakes of the entire globe, emphasizing the role of small boreal lakes as conduits for transferring terrestrially fixed C into the atmosphere.
Kortelainen et al. (2006) studied this question.