Abstract EANA2025-192

Understanding how carbon moves through early-stage ecosystems compared to mature natural systems matters not only for land restoration on Earth, but also for designing life-supporting landscapes on other planets. In this study, we investigate how flux dynamics across early-stage colonizers on a controlled basalt landscape compare to their natural desert counterparts, and what this reveals about succession in model terraformation environments. The Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO) in Biosphere 2 is a large-scale laboratory made up of three controlled basalt hillslopes. What began as an inert substrate was gradually colonized by cyanobacteria-dominated biocrusts and Funaria hygrometrica mosses from the surrounding desert environment. Using a LI-COR LI-850, we measured CO2 and water vapor flux across moss dominated, biocrust dominated, and bare basalt plots on LEO’s west slope with each representing a distinct stage in ecological succession. We compared these measurements to fluxes from outdoor desert soil plots in the surrounding area, where the same organisms occur in a fully natural environment. This comparison allows us to assess how closely LEO mirrors real world flux dynamics both in overall scale and diurnal behavior. Preliminary results from our diurnal measurements suggest that biological cover type has influence on CO2 and H2O flux patterns. This work supports LEO as an experimental model for early-stage terraformation where different surface coverage represents successive stages in landscape evolution. These findings are relevant to modeling carbon cycling in both non-terrestrial and terrestrial systems.