Coastal Wetland Carbon Sequestration in a Warmer Climate (Final Report)
- Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, MD (United States); Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
- Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Gloucester Point, VA (United States)
- Northern Arizona Univ., Flagstaff, AZ (United States)
- Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN (United States)
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Coastal wetlands are global hotspots of carbon storage and locations where carbon and nitrogen cycles have a disproportionately large impact on land, water, and air in comparison to the area they occupy. The extremely high rates of carbon sequestration in these systems are the result of complex feedbacks between vegetation and the physical environment. The plant and microbial interactions that drive these feedbacks are absent in ecosystem- and global-scale Earth System models. The goal of this proposal was to address the uncertain response of the coastal carbon sink to climate change, a critical knowledge gap in coastal carbon research and a significant barrier to incorporating coastal wetlands into Earth System Models. The Salt Marsh Accretion Response to Temperature eXperiment (SMARTX) was designed to understand the ecosystem-scale consequences of warming and elevated CO₂ (eCO₂) in tidal wetlands at the coastal terrestrial-aquatic interface. We successfully designed and built a novel whole-ecosystem warming and eCO₂ experiment in a coastal wetland. The gradient design of the warming treatments (+0, +1.7, +3.4, +5.1 ⁰C) allowed us to discover unexpected non-linear and non-additive responses arising from plant-microbe interactions. We concluded that these non-linear responses to warming were the result of plants and microbes responding to temperature at different thresholds, with important consequences for forecasting terrestrial ecosystem responses to climate change and understanding global trends.
- Research Organization:
- Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER). Earth and Environmental Systems Science Division
- Contributing Organization:
- U.S. Geological Survey, Boulder, CO (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0014413
- OSTI ID:
- 1637262
- Report Number(s):
- Final Report:DOE-SERC--14413
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Coastal Wetland Carbon Processes in a Warmer Climate (Final Report)
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Wed May 27 00:00:00 EDT 2020
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OSTI ID:1970458