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Abstract
Organic carbon accumulation in the sediments of inland aquatic and coastal ecosystems is an important process in the global carbon budget that is subject to intense human modification. To date, research has focused on quantifying accumulation rates in individual or groups of aquatic ecosystems to quantify the aquatic carbon sinks. However, there hasn’t been a synthesis of rates across aquatic ecosystem to address the variability in rates within and among ecosystems types. Doing so would identify gaps in our understanding of accumulation rates and potentially reveal carbon sinks vulnerable to change. We synthesized accumulation rates from the literature, compiling 464 rate measurements from 103 studies of carbon accumulated in the modern period (ca. 200 years). Accumulation rates from the literature spanned four orders of magnitude varying substantially within and among ecosystem categories, with mean estimates for ecosystem categories ranging from 15.6 to 73.2 g C m−2 y−1 within ecosystem categories. With the exception of lakes, mean accumulation rates were poorly constrained due to high variability and paucity of data. Despite the high uncertainty, the estimates of modern accumulation rate compiled here are an important step for constructing carbon budgets and predicting future change.
Highlights
The stock and flux of organic carbon in the sediments of inland aquatic and coastal ecosystems comprises a substantial and active portion of the global carbon sink
Comparing carbon accumulation estimates for aquatic ecosystems is hampered by a lack of standardized methods and definition of carbon accumulation
Combining sedimentation rates at the scale of weeks and down-core accumulation rates measured at the scale of decades conflates two times scales for measuring organic carbon accumulation and can inflate mean estimates
Summary
Measurements of organic carbon accumulation spanned one to three orders of magnitude (Table 1) with a high degree of overlap among the distributions. The uncertainty in the modeled mean accumulation rates by category overlapped substantially providing little support for large differences in mean carbon accumulation rates among ecosystem types (Fig. 1). The mean accumulation rates estimated for continental shelf ecosystems is similar to some[5] but not all[10] recent estimates The discrepancies for this ecosystem type seem to largely be due to study methods. Based on the differences in the geographical distribution of all aquatic ecosystems and the measured population of that ecosystem type, it is unlikely that the mean carbon accumulation rates presented here are equivalent to the true global mean carbon
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