Local wetlands to take a look at the Scripps oceanographic study on carbon storage in coastal ecosystems

In an attempt to fill in a missing piece of the climate change puzzle, the work of a former researcher from UC San Diego’s Scripps Oceanographic Institution in La Jolla, who has studied carbon sequestration by mangroves in remote parts of the world, is heading to San Diego. area of ​​wetlands.

A study led by Scripps, published late last year, looked at how some aquatic ecosystems capture more carbon from the atmosphere than others and presented an analysis of more than 100 sediment cores from mangrove forests in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, the Galápagos Islands and Caribbean sea. Pacific coast of Panama.

Mangroves are trees that grow in tropical environments and can survive on the edge of the ocean.

Moving the work forward, the researchers plan to conduct field surveys in the coming months at sites in San Diego County, such as San Dieguito Lagoon, Famosa Slough, and the Kendall Frost Mission Bay Marsh Reserve, to sample sediment and catalog the amount of carbon stored in them.

Such sequestration can reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.

Work on the role of coastal ecosystems in carbon sequestration began in 2013 under the direction of Matthew Costa, who graduated from Scripps Oceanography in 2019 and is currently a SIO Visiting Scientist.

Mangroves were known a decade ago to help remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in sediment, Costa said. But there were “huge gaps” in what scientists knew about how much carbon was stored based on the location and depth of the deposits beneath the groves.

“Regular mangroves receive a lot of rainfall and are located close to river mouths,” Costa said. “I looked for other places where they can live, especially in Baja California. … We wanted to learn more about them and how mangroves can store carbon. Does this service they provide extend to extreme conditions? Is carbon sequestration widespread in the various environmental conditions that mangroves live in?”

To try to answer these questions and more, Costa visited 80 different mangroves in different settings and drilled into the sediment to determine how much carbon is stored at different depths.

“Some [studies] focused on the top meter or so of sediment and assumed that was all they needed to consider,” Costa said. “One of the main findings of my dissertation is how important it was to study deeper sediment cores and study samples at different depths. Simply understanding how deep the deposits are is very important for understanding how much carbon is in them.”

After graduating from SIO, Costa began working as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Climate Change Impact and Adaptation at SIO, focusing his research on local subtidal ecosystems of blue carbon—that is, carbon that was buried in environments that are entirely underwater, such as marine thickets. algae and canyons off La Jolla.

“These ecosystems, especially salt marshes and algae, are like mangroves but live higher up on the planet,” Costa said. “They create soil rich in carbon and it stays there for centuries or millennia. We try to capture this variability in the underground landscape by looking at how deep the sediment goes.

“It led to different conclusions. In one place, which is a tiny wetland, we found that the sediments extend less than a meter … and in another place, the sediments go more than 4 meters deep. Thus, we learned that only a small sample gives a distorted idea of ​​how deep it is.”

A recent study shows that any calculation of carbon storage must account for such wide variations in depth. As a rule, Costa concluded, the more sediment, the more carbon is stored in it.

Thus, the work is extended to the San Diego area to collect background data at various depths.

“We hope that as we get reliable data … we will share it with the public,” Costa said, adding that he would like the first results to be published this year.

He said he hopes his work will show the importance of preserving existing wetlands.

“If these areas are disturbed, it will disrupt hundreds of years of carbon sequestration,” he said. “If we dig these things up, it could undo something that would take a long time to fix. Much attention is paid to the conservation of wetlands, [and] it is important not to disturb those who are there.” ◆

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