Impact of Environmental Factors on the Carbon Dynamics at Hooghly Estuarine Region

Joyita Mukherjee,Santanu Ray,Phani Bhusan Ghosh,Arnab Banerjee,Moitreyee Banerjee,Madhumita Roy

doi:10.1155/2014/607528

Abstract

Degradation of litter from mangrove forests adjacent to the creeks at Sagar Island of the Hooghly-Matla estuarine ecosystem is one of the principal sources of nutrient to the estuary. This system receives a major load of carbon from adjacent mangrove forest in the form of litterfall throughout the year. Keeping in view, the effect of environmental factor on the dynamics of carbon is studied through multivariate statistics. Essential environmental variables like soil carbon, dissolved carbon, temperature, salinity, pH, and dissolved oxygen are analyzed following standard protocol. Multivariate statistical analyses like correlation, regression, and centered PCA ordination are done in order to know the impact of environmental variables on carbon dynamics. The results reflect a close intercorrelation among the studied environmental variables and carbon. It also emphasizes the fact that soil and water temperature, and dissolved oxygen affect soil carbon dynamics, whereas salinity and pH of soil and water greatly regulate dissolved carbon dynamics. The variance pattern of these studied variables through seasons is also enumerated by PCA ordination studies.

Highlights

Out of the fourteen major rivers, the Ganges (2,525 km in length) along with its tributaries is the largest major river basin in India [1, 2]
Year and season are taken as two independent variables and different forms of carbon (SIC, soil organic carbon (SOC), dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), DCO2, dissolved bicarbonate (DBC), dissolved organic carbon (DOC), and particulate organic carbon (POC)) as the dependent variables for multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA)
When seasons and year are considered separately as the independent variables for MANOVA, it shows that seasons have quite significant effect on the dependent variable (Table 1) whereas year does not have any significant effect (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Out of the fourteen major rivers, the Ganges (2,525 km in length) along with its tributaries is the largest major river basin in India [1, 2]. Primary production is controlled by the light availability that depends on the concentration of suspended particulate matter [4] and surface water remains undersaturated with respect to dissolved oxygen and production of large quantities of dissolved carbon dioxide takes place in this estuary [5]. This estuary seems to be net heterotrophic ecosystem and the order of magnitude of the resulting atmospheric CO2 source has been studied. The organic pools include dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and particulate organic carbon (POC) [12]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion