Abstract EANA2025-184

As humanity looks to the habitation of other worlds, a key question is to understand how landscapes change as life colonizes, assembles, and transforms inhospitable landscapes into healthy sustainable ecosystems. A critical need for such investigation is to quantify and explore the relationship between landscape evolution and the fluxes of key bioactive trace gases. Here, we investigate how fluxes of water (H2O) vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2) change with development stages along an experimental early successional hillslope of basalt parent material. Within the unique facility of the Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO), a large-scale laboratory for the study of landscape terraformation, we used flux chambers to assess how flux dynamics changed with successional transitions in which bare soil (crushed basalt parent material) was colonized first by cyanobacterial crusts (“biocrusts”) and then by biocrust-moss associations as the landscape developed. Utilizing one hillslope of LEO as a testbed, we collected flux measurements from the three different successional stages (bare soil, biocrust, and moss). These measurements were made with surface flux chambers (~100 cm2,) and encompassed day vs night time periods under of dry, moderately wet and wet soil conditions. Preliminary CO2 and H2O fluxes showed trends with the successional stage and with soil moisture that provide valuable insights into the process of landscape terraformation.