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Carbon accumulation and storage across contrasting saltmarshes of Scotland

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Date
05/03/2023
Author
Miller, Lucy
Smeaton, Craig
Yang, Handong
Austin, William
Funder
NERC
Grant ID
NE/R010846/1
Keywords
Carbon
Wetlands
Coastal
Soil
Belowground
Aboveground
Scotland
Saltmarsh
Salt marsh
Organic carbon
Roots
Vegetation
Burial
Storage
Stock
210-Pb geochronology
137Cs
Dating
Chronology
GE Environmental Sciences
Global and Planetary Change
General Environmental Science
Ecology
DAS
SDG 13 - Climate Action
SDG 14 - Life Below Water
SDG 15 - Life on Land
MCC
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Abstract
Saltmarshes are acknowledged to be “carbon hotspots” due to their capacity to trap and store large quantities of carbon (C) within their soils and potentially have the ability to regulate climate over different timescales. In-turn governments and international organizations are now recognizing the need to include these intertidal ecosystems in national and global C accounting. Yet, in many regions, estimates of organic carbon (OC) storage and the rate at which OC is buried in saltmarsh soils either do not exist or at not at the scale necessary for inclusion in national C budgets. Here we bring together tools from across the geosciences to investigate the quantity of OC held within the soil and above/belowground biomass alongside estimates of the rate at which OC accumulates and the source of the OC within the soils of four contrasting Scottish saltmarshes. Using radiometric dating techniques it is estimated that OC accumulates at a rate of between 29.1 and 198.1 g C m⁻² yr⁻¹ across the different study sites. In contrast, the source of the OC varies little across the sites with 73%–99% of the OC within the saltmarsh soil originating from terrestrial/in situ sources; marine-derived OC plays a minor role in the development of the saltmarsh OC stocks. Using average values derived from the four sites it is possible to make first-order estimates of saltmarsh OC stocks and accumulation rates for all Scotland's 240 mapped saltmarshes. It is estimated that across Scotland saltmarsh habitat stores 1.15 ± 0.21 Mt OC which is supplemented by an additional 4385 ± 481 tonnes of OC each year.
Citation
Miller , L , Smeaton , C , Yang , H & Austin , W 2023 , ' Carbon accumulation and storage across contrasting saltmarshes of Scotland ' , Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science , vol. 282 , 108223 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecss.2023.108223
Publication
Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecss.2023.108223
ISSN
0272-7714
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Description
Funding: This research was finically supported by the Scottish Blue Carbon Forum and the Natural Environment Research Council funded Carbon Storage in Intertidal Environments (C-SIDE) project (grant NE/R010846/1).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/26840

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