Long-Term Sediment, Carbon, and Nitrogen Accumulation Rates in Coastal Wetlands Impacted by Sea Level Rise

Gundersen, Gillian; Corbett, D. Reide; Long, Austyn; Martinez, Melinda; Ardón, Marcelo

doi:10.1007/s12237-021-00928-z

Cited by 10 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 50 publications

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“…An assessment of seven sediment-rich Louisiana marshes found that two marshes were already carbon sources, and four of the remaining five would become carbon sources within the next 80 years due to loss of carbon from drowned and eroded marshes [34]. Extrapolating measured accretion and carbon accumulation rates for wetlands in the Albemarle-Pamlico peninsula in North Carolina estimated that carbon sequestration by those wetlands would decline by 35% (for 25 cm SLR) to 88% (for 100 cm SLR) without accounting for inland migration of coastal wetlands [88]. With migration included, carbon sequestration declines were smaller (2% and 23% under the 25 cm and 100 cm SLR scenarios), but these estimates did not account for reduced biomass carbon sequestration in areas that convert from forests to marshes, or carbon emissions resulting from tree mortality in those areas, some of the largest carbon losses in our model.…”

Section: Plos Climatementioning

confidence: 99%

Sea level rise drives carbon and habitat loss in the U.S. mid-Atlantic coastal zone

2022

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Coastal marshes and seagrass beds store millions of tons of carbon in their sediments and sequester carbon at higher per-area rates than most terrestrial ecosystems. There is substantial interest in this “blue carbon” as a carbon mitigation strategy, despite the major threat that sea level rise (SLR) poses to these habitats. Many projections of habitat and carbon change with SLR emphasize the potential for inland marsh migration and increased rates of marsh carbon sequestration, but do not consider carbon fluxes associated with habitat conversion. We integrated existing data and models to develop a spatial model for predicting habitat and carbon changes due to SLR in six mid-Atlantic U.S. states likely to face coastal habitat loss over the next century due to low tidal ranges and sediment supply. Our primary model projection, using an intermediate SLR scenario (1.2 m SLR by 2104), predicts loss of 83% of existing coastal marshes and 26% of existing seagrasses in the study area. In addition, 270,000 hectares of forest and forested wetlands in low-lying coastal areas will convert to coastal marshes. These SLR-driven habitat changes cause the study area to shift from a carbon sink to a source in our primary model projection. Given the many uncertainties about the habitat and carbon changes represented in our model, we also identified the parameters and assumptions that most strongly affected the model results to inform future research needs. These included: land availability for inland marsh migration, the baseline extent and location of coastal marshes, proportion of stored carbon emitted from lost habitats (coastal marsh sediments or terrestrial biomass carbon), and methane emissions from freshwater habitats. The study area switched from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source under SLR for all but three model runs; in those runs, net carbon sequestration declined by 57–99%.

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Section: Plos Climatementioning

confidence: 99%

Sea level rise drives carbon and habitat loss in the U.S. mid-Atlantic coastal zone

2022

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Standard metrics for characterizing episodic salinization in freshwater systems

Neville,

Emanuel,

Nelson

et al. 2024

Limnology & Ocean Methods

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Salinization threatens freshwater resources and freshwater‐dependent wetlands in coastal areas worldwide. Many research efforts focus on gradual or chronic salinization, but the phenomenon is also episodic in nature, particularly in small streams and artificial waterways. In surface waters, salinization events may coincide with storms, droughts, wind tides, and other episodic events. A lack of standardized quantitative methods and metrics for describing and discussing episodic salinization hinders cross‐disciplinary efforts by scientists and others to analyze, discuss, and make recommendations concerning these events. Here, we present a set of metrics that use statistics which describe flow characteristics in rivers and streams as a template for empirically describing and characterizing salinization events. We developed a set of metrics to quantify the duration, magnitude, and other characteristics of episodic salinization, and we apply the metrics to extensive time‐series data from a field site in coastal North Carolina. We then demonstrate the utility of these metrics by coupling them with ancillary data to perform an unsupervised classification that groups individual salinization events by their primary meteorological driver. We provide simple and flexible code needed to compute metrics in any environment experiencing salinization events in hopes that it will facilitate more standardized approaches to the quantification and study of widespread freshwater salinization.

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Detecting Trajectories of Regime Shifts and Loss of Resilience in Coastal Wetlands using Remote Sensing

Martinez,

Ardón,

Gray

2024

Ecosystems

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Long-Term Sediment, Carbon, and Nitrogen Accumulation Rates in Coastal Wetlands Impacted by Sea Level Rise

Cited by 10 publications

References 50 publications

Sea level rise drives carbon and habitat loss in the U.S. mid-Atlantic coastal zone

Sea level rise drives carbon and habitat loss in the U.S. mid-Atlantic coastal zone

Standard metrics for characterizing episodic salinization in freshwater systems

Detecting Trajectories of Regime Shifts and Loss of Resilience in Coastal Wetlands using Remote Sensing

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