Thirty percent of all soil carbon on Earth is stored in wetlands, despite their limited global extent of 5-6% of global land area. This number doubles when including the amount of carbon stored in permafrost (Mitsch & Gosselink, 2007). Wetland gas exchange is an area of study with an urgent need for further investigation, due to its relevance to our climate, the carbon market, and other pressing issues. This dissertation contributes new knowledge to the field of wetland gas exchange by exploring the role of photosynthetic rates in daily and yearly wetland CO2 and CH4 fluxes. Eddy covariance flux data, low cost in-situ water quality measurements, and additional meteorological variables from multiple wetland sites are presented here to test the complex drivers of lateral and vertical wetland gas exchange and determine sufficient methods for data collection and testing. Results show that photosynthetic rates influence vertical wetland CH4 emissions, but do not consistently influence lateral fluxes of dissolved CO2. Many variables differ across wetland types and individual sites, such as hydraulic residence time, daily average dissolved CO2 concentrations, and annual methane emissions. This work can guide wetland restoration techniques (e.g., critical inundation levels), low-cost water quality and CO2 monitoring, and future estimation of lateral CO2 export based on environmental drivers.