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Stream ecosystem processes, such as metabolism, are dynamically impacted by flow intensity. Therefore, without integrating ecosystem processes with water quality, we miss opportunities to develop frameworks to understand metabolic responses to changing flow. Flow simultaneously affects the material transport and biological opportunities for material transformation. Combining the strengths of ecohydrology and stream ecology to understand how flow variation alters ecosystem processes, we analyzed more than 5 years of water quality and stream metabolism data. We created segmented process‐discharge (P‐Q) relationships to examine how metabolism rates vary across discharge and compared them to concentration‐discharge (C‐Q) relationships to explore the dynamic effects of discharge on processes and physicochemical parameters. Within the segmented P‐Q relationships, we found the behavior of …