Tidal wetland resilience to sea level rise increases their carbon sequestration capacity in United States.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31780651.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-13294-z and PMC identifier 6883032.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Coastal wetlands are large reservoirs of soil carbon (C). However, the annual C accumulation rates contributing to the C storage in these systems have yet to be spatially estimated on a large scale. We synthesized C accumulation rate (CAR) in tidal wetlands of the conterminous United States (US), upscaled the CAR to national scale, and predicted trends based on climate change scenarios. Here, we show that the mean CAR is 161.8 ± 6 g Cm<sup>-2 </sup>yr<sup>-1</sup>, and the conterminous US tidal wetlands sequestrate 4.2-5.0 Tg C yr<sup>-1</sup>. Relative sea level rise (RSLR) largely regulates the CAR. The tidal wetland CAR is projected to increase in this century and continue their C sequestration capacity in all climate change scenarios, suggesting a strong resilience to sea level rise. These results serve as a baseline assessment of C accumulation in tidal wetlands of US, and indicate a significant C sink throughout this century.